"Draped Crusaders": Disrobing Gender in The Mark of Zorro
By Catherine Williamson

"Secret identity" adventure narratives such as "The Mark of Zorro" invoke homosexual textuality when one character runs the spectrum of gender identities. Such homosexualness is always contained, however, by the text's conservative political agenda.

"The moment I donned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away. My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my vice grew strong and firm, fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask. I was the languid Don Diego again. Is it not a peculiar thing?" --Johnston McCulley, "The Mark of Zorro"

Peculiar, maybe, but no figure is as familiar as the he-man superhero who hides behind a mild-mannered alter ego, the latter inept or meek or (in Zorro's case) just plain effeminate enough to deflect any suspicion about a connection to the former. At least since the appearance of "The Scarlet Pimpernel," popular heroes of novels, films, and comic books have used clothing and gender performance as tools to fight crime.

The convention of the "secret identity" in adventure fiction and the comics is often dismissed as a generic adolescent fantasy of the heterosexual male: "the most beautiful girl in school thinks I'm a geek, but really I'm..." fill in the blank.¹ By this identificatory logic, the superhero who exploits the gender continuum from feminine to hyper masculine is a projection of a young boy's maturation from androgynous adolescent to adult male. While this explanation is absolutely plausible, I can't help feeling that it is the "straight" or "cover" story, itself masking a secret. I would like to re-pose the obvious question: why would a disguise which plays with gender polarities grounded against one sex help someone "different" better function in a hostile environment?

The "secret identity" trope reminds me of two often times related but not interchangeable phenomena, drag and the closet: drag because of the way super heroes use clothing and performance to signify an ironic relationship between gender and sex; the closet because of the way secrecy and silence permeate all corners of superhero characterization, including--and especially--sexuality.

By no means am I the first to suggest a homosexual textuality coexisting with heterosexual discourse in the caped crusaders oeuvre. In 1954 psychiatrist Frederic Wertham raised eyebrows over Batman and Robin's living arrangement, implying that they could easily qualify as the poster couple for NAMBLA:

Wertham's insinuations must have hit a nerve, for soon after, Batman and Robin acquired heterosexual love interests, and the 1989 and 1991 Batman films (made in and era of both increased awareness of homosexuality and intensified homophobia) have been compelled to drop the Robin character altogether.³ Wertham also accuses wonder woman of lesbianism, citing her Amazonian roots and all-female support group. Other critics have wondered at Superman's long-running chastity supposedly motivated by a fear of being blackmailed.⁴ While these reading suggest an interesting revision of the superhero tradition, they imply that homosexual discourse is only invoked by issues of object choice and behavior: when we wonder what Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman and the Holliday Girls, and Superman and Lois Lane do or don't do in the privacy of their own homes. I would like to suggest that it is the disguise itself, or rather the convention of the "secret identity." which allows for gay reading of superhero texts.⁵

For my purposes, I've chosen to pursue a close reading of the 1940 film version of The Mark of Zorro starring Tyrone Power. Since its appearance, the Zorro myth has been a mainstay of action-adventure fiction and cinema. The original novel by Johnston McCulley appeared in 1919 in serial form under the title, THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO (reissued soon after as The Mark of Zorro). McCulley, a popular author of pulp adventure and romance, borrows heavily from THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL in this tale of a masked swordsman hiding his daring deeds behind a dandyish persona. In 1920 Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., starred in the original film version of The Mark of Zorro, the first of the costume pieces which would define his most successful period of work. Zorro became a successful franchise for both author and actor. McCulley continued to write Zorro sequels, and Fairbanks made both DON Q, SON OF ZORRO and THE BLACK PIRATE, the latter based on McCulley's sequel Further Adventures of Zorro.⁶

In addition to redefining the adventure picture, Fairbanks's version of The Mark of Zorro profoundly influenced the burgeoning comic book industry of the thirties. The teenage creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, acknowledged their admiration of Fairbanks's films, particularly The Mark of Zorro and THE BLACK PIRATE. when the time came to physically define their superhero, they modeled his face and physique--and his distinctive hands-on-hips stance--on Douglas Fairbanks.⁷ Likewise Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, affirms that the Fairbanks version of The Mark of Zorro was one of the two films that contributed significantly to the formulation of Batman.⁸

While it might be interesting to examine the 1920 film starring Douglas Fairbanks (the version which the comic book industry claims was so influential), it is the Tyrone Power version which stands at the intersection of the comic book industry, camp, and classical Hollywood cinema and therefore is more relevant to contemporary gay theory.⁹ Appearing so soon after Superman (1938) and Batman (1939), the Power version is quite possibly a studio attempt to cash in on the popularity of the new comic book figures. As both a camp classic and "family" picture, the 1940 film anticipates the "Batman" television series of the sixties. And it remains in circulation to this day (on video and in rotation on AMC), while silent films have virtually disappeared from the realm of public consumption.

This article will explore the construction of "secret identities" in THE MARK OZ ZORRO and question how tensions between homosexuality and heterosexuality are negotiated through the hero's feminine and hyper masculine identities; it will explore how the presence of the military complicates the tentative heterosexual resolution of the "secret identity" masquerade; and finally, it will trace how the political discourse of the adventure narrative attempts to contain homosexual discourse. When we understand how superheroes invoke and repress homosexuality we can begin to speculate why they are so popular and what effect they have had on modern sexual politics.

Who was the masked man? The first difficulty in exploring "secret identities" is deciding which identity is the secret one, the superhero or the "ordinary" counterpart. The answer is, they both are, or, rather, each is the other's secret: Clark masks Superman, Superman masks Clark. One identity is generally privileged as "original"--Kal-El the alien baby, Bruce Wayne the orphan--but as either crime fighting superheroes or mild-mannered playboys/reporters, the caped crusaders always have something to hide. Significantly, each identity is constructed (and conceals its particular secret) through costumes as well as performance: hence we have Superman's blue tights versus Clark's wire-rimmed glasses; Batman's black cowl versus Bruce Wayne's dressing gown; Zorro black mask versus Don Diego's' fashionable to read the convention of the "secret identity" as a form of same-sex drag.

Judith Butler argues that cross-sex drag problematizes sexual and gender identities that otherwise are assumed to be coherent.¹⁰ Cross-sex drag desessentializes gender, revealing the instabilities with within the rigid cultural distinctions between "male" and "female" and "masculine" and "feminine" by demonstrating how it is possible for one sex to appropriate the gender characteristics culturally assigned to the other. Whether done convincingly or parodically, cross-dressing exposes gender as and act.¹¹

Same-sex drag, like cross-sex drag, is effected through clothing and performance, but without actually donning the gender-coded garb of the other sex. It is a masquerade which, like cross-dressing, "uses sartorial disguise to create alternative identities"¹² and which can subsequently highlight constructions of sex, gender, and, most importantly for my discussion sexual orientation. The most vivid examples are, of course, the man in feminized male attire (Liberace) and the woman in masculinized female attire (Mildred Pierce in a masculine tailored business suite), but same-sex drag can also refer to those individuals who don the culturally assigned garb of their own sex: the feminine female and the masculine male (and all points in between).¹³ To a homophobic culture which equates gender performance with sexual orientation, same-sex drag which crosses gender promotes homosexual visibility independent of sexual activity, while a gender performance that correlates with an individual's sex invokes heterosexual privilege regardless of sexual orientation.¹⁴

The gender crossing performed by superheroes like Zorro would seem to complicate the cultural collapse of gender performance with sexual orientation since one character encompasses and makes visible the entire spectrum of gender possibilities and, by association, sexual orientations. the superhero texts are very careful to maintain control over gender play, however by compensating with displays of heterosexual desire even as they suggest the possibility of homosexual orientation.

The Mark of Zorro opens in a Spanish military academy with cadet Diego Vega (Tyrone Power) called home to California, he learns that his father has been forced to resign, and the city is now run by Luis Quintero, the corrupt mayor who extorts heavy taxes from the citizens with the help of the military. Diego assumes feminine, dandyish behavior in front of the new alcade and his military aide Esteban (Basil Rathbone), the Vega family, and even Lolita (Linda Darnell), his soon-to-be powers-that-be. Once the town believes him to be a "coxcomb," he is free to roam the countryside as Zorro, terrorizing the leaders of the corrupt government and ultimately effecting the restoration of his father to office.

Diego's feminine "disguise" is carefully established early in the film through clothing and performance. After dazzling the Californians with his sumptuous wardrobe, Diego enthusiastically broadcasts his love of shopping: "Ah, I love the shimmer of satin and silk, and the matching of one delicate shade against another. Then there's the choosing of scents and lotions. Attar of rose, carnation, crushed lily, and musk."

In addition to professing a fascination with the cosmetic arts, Diego's dandy persona is feminized economically as a rampant consumer, unlike the other caballeros (his father, for instance), who are capitalist plantation owners. Diego also professes an abhorrence of swards: when asked by Esteban whether he fancies the weapon, Diego replies, dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief, "I know very little about it, my dear Capitan. Swordplay is such a violent business." Furthermore, Diego as dandy is overtly apolitical, responding to his father's discussion of political strategy in California with an insipid magic trick. By emphasizing and obsession with the fashionable and the trivial, Diego as dandy assures the men around him that he is unfit to engage in the masculine realm of war and politics and therefore harmless.

Diego's class standing provides part of the justification for his dandy drag: the film relies on a cultural awareness of the dandy as a historical type, one that can possibly be read as a "ladie's man." In addition, Diego's access to education, Europe, and the Spanish court justifies his bored aestheticism and feminized inter questions of sexuality which haunt the text; in fact, dandyism invokes homosexuality, since history's most famous dandies--Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley--are also some of its most famous homosexuals. Once Diego's femininity is established, Diego arrives late at a diner at which a marriage between himself and Lolita is to be arranged, he apologies for his tardiness by complaining that his bath was tepid. Esteban retorts, "Poor Lolita, I'm afraid her wedded life will be the same."

The collapse of gender and sexual orientation in The Mark of Zorro occurs not only within the mise-en-scene as clothing and performance but also on a structural level. Immediately preceding the speech about shopping (quoted above), which establishes the dandy persona and elicits smirks from Luis and Esteban, Diego looks through a window and catches sight of the beautiful Lolita standing in the courtyard holding a white cat. The momentum of the scene comes to a halt as we see a shot/reverse shot structure of Diego looking/Lolita playing i the courtyard with her pussy(cat)/and Diego again, smiling. Diego's gender-coded performance as an effeminate male immediately follows--and is intended to be read as oppositional to--his heterosexual desire for (look at) Lolita, so that an effeminate gender performance is assumed to signify a lack of heterosexuality (meaning homosexuality) to the characters within the diegesis in the same way that the shot/reverse shot structure signifies heterosexuality to the viewer of the film. In order to disguise his sexual desire for Lolita--a desire which, in an of itself, is not dangerous but which would signal a threatening masculinity to the villains who also collapse sexual orientation and gender--Diego assumes a non-threatening gender performance.

The narrative logic of Diego's disguise is that, if all around him perceive him to be a frivolous, effeminate, apolitical dandy, no one will suspect him of also being Zorro, the guerrilla in black who roams the countryside terrorizing the corrupt government and military. Not surprisingly, the dandy drag works well within the diegesis even as the spectator is aware of its function as masquerade. After meeting Diego for the first time, the alcade comments, "That's one little peacock that won't give us any trouble," clearly indicating his belief in the incontestability of binary opposites like masculine/feminine, active/passive, and gay/straight. In Diego's world, one cannot be both Zorro and a fop, interested in fabrics and interested in swords. this is why each time Diego reveals himself as Zorro, his family and friends don't' believe him and have to be convinced with proof. Diego is, then, a sort of closeted heterosexual whose repeated "coming outs" as the hyper masculine (and, we are to assumed, straight) Zorro are met with shock and disbelief. Lolita responds to the news with, "You! Pretending toe be Zorro!" and Diego's father, Don Alexandro, gasps, "What idiotic joke is this?"

The movie tries to insist that it is the active, hyper masculine Zorro identity--the one who romances Lolita and single-handedly fights for justice--which is Diego's "essential" identity. given the way the film privileges Zorro's surreptitious sexual lookings at Lolita, it's not difficult to assume that the dandy's sexual non-interest in women is performance. Additionally, by invoking the closet as metaphor, the film authorizes the hidden "desire" (in this case, the dandy's repressed heterosexuality) as the authentic desire. But while Diego's dandy persona may function as a disguise, thereby announcing itself to the viewer as a performance, the secret identity "Zorro" is a masquerade as well. "Zorro" translates as "sly fox,"¹⁵ so that even if Zorro did to appear in public wearing a mask, the name alone would signify to the Californians that he caped crusader is engaging in some sort of deception. Hence if one disguised identity and sexuality is constructed and read as performance, the other disguised identity must be as well. In colonial California, at least while political corruption reigns, Diego has no non-performative persona, so that declaring "Zorro" to be both heterosexual and the "essential Diego Vega" requires a significant act of repression on the part of the viewer--an act, however, that many viewers readily perform.

A Few Good Men While for most of the film Diego oscillates between the dandy and Zorro personas, he first appears in the film as a military cadet in Spain, a fact which contextualizes the origins of Diego's same-sex drag within the all-male world of the military. ¹⁶ Since the comic book superheroes are frequently positioned as "warriors against crime," the relationship between the military and the performance of masculinity seems especially important to this discussion. Here I want to discuss how the presence of soldiers and military accoutrements complicates the already tenuous heterosexual resolution of the dandy/Zorro split.

The uniform of the "soldier" is an intensely symbolic costume: gender, sex, and sexual orientation are all signified by military apparel--at least in a country like the United States, which maintains a ban if not exactly on gays i the military then on visibly gay military personnel. And yet, the theatricality of the "fancy dress" uniform can convey a certain "feminization" and hence a certain anxiety in relations to gender and sexual orientation through sartorial excess, just as Diego's elaborate dandy apparel does. ¹⁷ It is significant, then, that in the first few scenes of the film, Diego appears in a fancy dress military uniform which another cadet refers to as his "fine feathers."

Beneath the military uniform is another easily manipulates signifier: the body of the military male. In Discipline and Punish Foucault comments on the transition from the seventeenth-century "ideal figure of the soldier" as "someone who could be recognized from afar"--an individual invested with essential physical and mental traits which mark him as a soldier--to a late-eighteenth-century conception of the soldier as "something that can be made."¹⁸ By the time of the historical period represented in The Mark of Zorro (and the period in which the film was produced) the figure of the soldier has evolved into a being that is constructed by the state through discipline and training, so that's soldiering, like dandyism, is a matter of performance and costume. In addition, Foucault writes, the soldier's body is functionally passive, docile, in that it "may be subjected, used, transformed and improved."¹⁹ Such passivity is actually desired, since the body grows more useful as it becomes more obedient, and vice versa. The "docile" body of the soldier complicates the notion of "activity", masculinity and heterosexuality assigned to military figures within the film. Being a good "soldier" means being like the ultimately victorious Diego--being a body capable of manipulating its own gender characteristics and by, extension, sexual orientation.

The sword itself, the weapon of choice for the military male, invokes the most play with sexual connotations in the film. The opening explanatory title announces that the film begins in Madrid, "When....young blades were taught the fine and fashionable art of killing." The film immediately fades to several shots of military cadets training with swords. Such as juxtaposition makes the phallic significance of the weapon explicit by insisting that "blades" are both the ever-present epees and sabers and the young men who wield them.²⁰

Diego's complicated relationship with his own blade begs a close examination. When he is called home by his father, Diego laments that in California he will have no one to fight; a fellow cadet asks him, "Then what will you do with this spur of yours, my cockerel?" indicating the saber. Diego replies, "this," as he hurls the blade upward into the rafters. The image of the sword in the roof appears again in the final scene, framing the main narrative of the film; hence, it bears examination as a visual trope. the first time the saber is tossed to the roof, Diego, is, in one sense, relinquishing phallic power because he assues it will not be necessary where he is going. He admonishes his peers to "leave [the saber] there, and when you see it, think of me in the land of gentle missions, happy peons, sleepy cabelleros--and everlasting boredom!" The sword in the roof reminds those Diego leaves behind of his emasculation, his status as a "blade without a blade" living the domesticated life of a colonial. It is also, however, a vivid image of penetration within an all-male environment. The blade in the roof will remind them of Diego the blade and Diego's blade, that is, his symbolic and literal phallic presence within the homosocial world of the military academy. The scene ends with Diego sardonically toasting, "to California, where men can only marry, raise fat children, and watch their vineyards grow." While California, is described in terms of immense fertility, Diego looks forward to reproduction (and heterosexualtiy) with great reluctance.

Diego needn't have sheathed his sword, however. Once in California, he finds a worthy opponent in Esteban, a man who can't seem to keep his own epee still: as Luis comments, Esteban is "forever thrustring at this and that." When a spectacular sword fight erupts between Diego and Esteban, their "slyly confirming" ²¹ dialogue points up the eroticism invested in the weapon of choice:

Diego: The capitan's blade is not so firm.
Esteban: Still firm enough to run you through!

By the end of the film, after order has been restored and Esteban has been "penetrated" by Diego's sword, Diego's reluctance to reproduce is supplanted by anticipation. Diego declares-happily this time-that he will "marry, raise fat children, and watch [his] vineyards grow" and once again tosses his saber up to the rafters. What was earlier a submission to is now an embrace of domesticity, punctuated by the actual embrace of Diego's fiancée, Lolita. It is also, significantly, an attempt to reject homoeroticism. If the blade has been the predominant signifier of masculinity, it has also been troubled by homosexual connotations throughout the film. The movie concludes with Diego's abandonment of one signifier and his embrace of another, Lolita, whose sole purpose throughout the film is to establish Diego's heterosexuality for the viewing audience even as he performs as a feminine male within the diegesis. At the same time, the second image of the sword in the roof recalls the first, left as a symbol of Diego's phallic presence within an all-male environment, so that while the image tries to cast off its homoerotic connotations, it reinvokes them.

"Politics, politics, what have they to do with my marriage?" .

For a virile, passionate man such as Batman, it must be frustrating to steel himself against love's siren call, giving himself totally to his crime-fighting obsession.
-Mark Cotta Vaz, Tales of the Dark Knight

Frustrating indeed. The sexuality of a superhero is always co-opted for a higher cause, in effect neutralized within a political narrative. Such a subsumation of the personal and private under public obligation-a default celibacy, if you will-conveniently makes sexual orientation a nonissue. What's unique about The Mark of Zorro (and what may account for its status as a camp favorite) is that, although ostensibly a strategy employed against political corruption, homosexual discourse via the dandy performance is established before it is given a full political justification. .

The first glimpse of Diego's dandy persona occurs early in the film when Esteban explains the military's takeover to Diego:
(Medium two-shot with actors facing each other. Diego steps in closer, shot tightens.)
Diego: Tell me, why has my father turned his home into a barracks?
Esteban: Conditions have changed since you left, Don Diego. Your father-retired. Age, you know. (Close-up, Diego.) Since then, the peons have become more industrious. (Close-up, Esteban.) The caballeros are encouraged to think of their own affairs. We take care of the government.
Diego: (Close-up, softly.) [see, I see.

Diego's femininity (indicated by the delicate way he delivers the line "I see") is clearly a response to Esteban's butch militarism but not yet a strategy for revolt. There isn't much narrative logic for Diego's behavior in this scene. Why, suddenly, is passivity the appropriate tactic for Diego, the military wonder, to employ? While he is aware of a certain amount of corruption in Los Angeles, Diego has no idea of what opposition may exist to the government or of where he might fit in with that opposition. Diego's feminine performance seems to come out of nowhere-politically, that is.

This pivotal scene plays with the conventional shot/reverse shot structure of heterosexual romance. When Diego steps close to Esteban to ask about his home, the conversation becomes markedly more intimate than the previous few lines, which have only been brief introductions. Esteban responds by telling Diego that his father has been overthrown: next we see the shot/reverse shot structure of Diego looking' Esteban returning the look while speaking’ and Diego again murmuring "I see." Ordinarily we would expect such a cinematic structure to empower Diego within the scene, and in fact he does manage to gather and process a certain amount of information about the current poetical cum ate. But the visual effect of the shots undercuts the structural convention. Esteban is about three inches taller than Diego, so the scene really works as follows: Diego looks up Esteban looks down/Diego relents. The top/bottom dynamic between Diego and Esteban is inscribed both per formatively, through the actions of the actors themselves (when Esteban invites Diego to meet the new alcalde, Diego responds coyly, "How can 1 refuse a man anything with a naked sword in his hand?"), and structurally, through the inversion of the shot/countershot convention. Although at this point in the film we don't know why Diego should be performing as a feminine male, we do know who his rival/partner will be. .

When Diego meets with his father and learns both the extent of the corruption and the caballeros' reluctance to fight, the political justification for Diego's feminine performance appears: he has deliberately appeared non-threatening so that no one will suspect him of being Zorro. The political narrative helps give Diego's dandyism a heterosexual spin, helps code it as performance, but a gap between the two narratives remains. Gayness is established through male femininity before it is qualified as a political tool. Even with such a qualification, the film's deployment of homosexuality promises a certain radical potential: gayness is imagined as a revolutionary tactic. The film undermines the radicalness of such a strategy. however, since the revolution the narrative suggests never takes place. .

The opening title of The Mark of Zorro sets the story during the time "when the Spanish Empire encompassed the globe," that is, firmly within an imperialist economy. Class relations are clearly delineated between the caballeros and the peons, and the Spanish crown is the ruling body. Like so many films immediately preceding World War II, villainy in this film is personified in a fascist, militaristic state which is distinguished from the monarchy and has somehow wrested power from it."²² The military's crime in The Mark of Zorro is the cruel oppression of the peons through excessive taxation. Though a logical narrative progression would suggest a revolt amongst the peons (since unfair taxation generally signals a call for revolutionary activity in American culture), the film assiduously avoids any activity which might be interpreted as a class struggle. While sympathetic to the peons, at no time does Diego/Zorro offer to lead them in revolt, nor does he suggest that they lead themselves. Neither will the film venture into a consideration of a republican revolution: when any character-the priest, for example--suggests that the peons and the caballeros take arms against the military in an egalitarian revolt, the others (who are always caballeros) simply agree that, for obvious reasons, that is not an option. The obvious reasons, however, remain largely unarticulated within the film. Though the circumstances indicate a fomenting revolution, the film wants to avoid actually having that revolution. .

Enter Zorro. Zorro is one lone guerrilla fighter with no revolution to lead and no army of revolutionaries to back him up. Diego's plan from the beginning is to wage individual acts of terror in order to convince the corrupt alcalde to resign, return to Spain, and name Diego's father as his successor, Diego is a conservative guerrilla who wants to topple the present government (not exactly bloodlessly, but close) only to restore the previous one, which is the benevolent, aristocratic rule of his father. Zorro fights for the aristocracy without their support and, while becoming a folk hero of sorts for the peons, does little to improve their constrained circumstances. It cannot be mere coincidence that Zorro, the flamboyant guerrilla who is outside all political systems, has as his alter ego an openly gay man, an outlaw of sorts himself. In fact, rather than polar opposites on the spectrum of sexuality, Zorro and the dandy really function as doubles. Craig Owens comments on the appearance during the nineteenth century of the "homosexual delinquent-an individual constitutionally predisposed to commit proscribed or illicit sexual acts, and therefore in need of supervision, correction, incarceration."²³ The illicit sexual acts of the homosexual delinquent translate in The Mark of Zorro to Zorro's illicit acts of violence-the robbery of the stagecoach, the "Z" carved in the sergeant's chest-because of the way sexuality is inscribed into every act of violence via the "blade." As the epigram at the beginning of this article suggests, all that separates the two apparently disparate identities of Diego the dandy and Zorro the hyper masculine "angel with a flaming sword" . is a cloak and a mask. .

The fact that the dandy and Zorro are two sides of the same gay coin doesn't forestall the political neutralization of homosexuality within the narrative. Ultimately, gayness is not a revolutionary tool used to fight fascism but a self-contained textual disturbance. In order to fight the homosociality run amok in California via the military. Diego uses homosexuality like an inoculation: its very "innocuousness" is what makes Diego's masquerade so successful a strategy in the first place and, at the same time, makes it dismissible in the end. Though the film's finale may look like a coup, it is not. The battle between the military and the citizens is immediately followed by a legal succession in which Luis officially resigns and names Don Alexandro as the new alcalde, Power is not wrested away but handed over from one leader to another. The film isn't really about a revolution led by a gay man to alleviate the suffering of the poor, Diego/Zorro's mission, it turns out, is about preserving the line of succession, about maintaining the system's power to "reproduce" itself. Individual reproduction (Diego's "fat children"), reproduction of the land (lush vineyards), and reproduction of the state all converge here, and ironically it is homosexuality which facilitates such a convergence. With the defeat of Esteban and the army, the film wants to dispel fascism, homosociality, and homosexuality in one fell swoop; reestablishing democracy (or at least benevolent imperialism) and heterosexuality in its place. The outlaw becomes an in-law and a future mayor. Having done its job, Diego's homosexuality is supposed to quietly fade away like the measles vaccine.

But then he tosses the sword to the roof again .... .

Draped and Caped Crusaders. The Mark of Zorro is an especially dramatic example of "secret identity"²⁴ fiction. one that flirts much more openly with homosexual discourse than its comic book cousins. And yet the pattern is the same. In almost every "draped crusader .••.• narrative, homosexual textuality is invoked, toyed with, then hastily contained within a politically conservative narrative. Like Zorro, the comic book superheroes function as cultural "spot cleaners," battling individual criminals rather than attacking the system that produces them. When the blemish is removed, order is restored. Instead of remaining radically homosexual, Diego's fluid same-sex drag as the dandy, the soldier, and Zorro wants to expand the boundaries of heterosexual masculinity (in an imperialist move that mimics the colonial discourse in The Mark of Zorro) while neutralizing and containing the specter of homosexuality-in effect promoting a tolerant but only experimental bisexuality as a dominion of heterosexuality. Once invoked, however, homosexual discourse is difficult if not impossible to banish, so that the superheroes must continue to fight for their heterosexuality as relentlessly as they battle crime. .

The "draped crusaders"' are more than just a curious phenomenon in American popular culture; like all cultural artifacts, they tell us a great deal about the political and social climate of the culture which produces and consumes them. I am thinking in particular about the U.S. government's "don't ask, don't tell"' policy on gays in the military. Rather than a clumsy compromise on an unexpectedly volatile issue, the policy now seems to me to be the logical extension of a narrative tradition which demands the expulsion of (homo)sexuality in the service of a "higher"' (political, militaristic) cause. The administration's policy attempts to separate sexual orientation from sexual activity, insisting that one can "be" gay as long as one does not pursue gay sex or inform the military of one's orientation. Like Zorro, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and other superheroes, gay military personnel must forego sexual relations in the line of duty while manufacturing a deliberately misleading persona. Thus their ability to serve as warriors is a direct function of a "secret" or closeted identity. What is most terrifying about this link between popular culture and government policy is the way the closet is reinforced as a "noble" or "heroic"' institution-something that should be done for the good of the country. By this logic the military is able to ignore evidence that suggests homosexuality has no bearing on fighting effectiveness-the stellar records of Col. Margarete Carmenmeyer, Lt. Tracy Thome, and Midshipman Joe Steffan, for example-and argue instead that gays can serve even better (as our favorite superheroes do) from the closet. As I come to the end of this article, I'm more and more convinced that Clinton and his advisors found their solution to the ban on gays in the military only when George Stephanopolous dropped his briefcase and spilled a stack of DC comics onto the Oval Office floor. .

NOTES

¹Dennis Dooley attributes a version of this fantasy to the teenage creators of Superman. Jeny Siegel and Joel Shuster. Both were mild-mannered, wore glasses. were very shy with women, and, he assumes, were heterosexual. See Dooley, ~The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday:' in Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend, ed. Dooley and Gary Engle (Cleveland, Octavia Press, 198i),30.
²Frederic \\'ertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1954), 190.
³Robin reappears in Batman Forever (1995), as does the homoerotic tension between the boy wonder and the dark knight, In fact, acknowledgment of the homoerotic element in the Batman mythos is texla)' almost a given, See, for example, Andy Medhurst, "Batman, Deviance and Camp," in The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991); Stephen Winiek, "Batman in the Closet, A New York Legend: Contemporary Legend 2 (1992), 1-21; D3\;d Levering, "The Last Real Man in Amery", From Natty Bump to Batman" American Literary History (winter 1991): 753-81. •
⁴Joanna Connors, "Female Meets Supennale," in Superman at Fifty, Ill.
⁵I am not the first to suggest this. Eve Sedgwick argues that however "the closet" may be used in discourse, it always maintains its connection to homosexuality: "The apparent floating-free from its gay origins of that phrase 'coming out of the closet' in recent usage might suggest that the trope of the closet is so close to the heart of some modem preoccupations that it could be or has been evacuated of its historical gay specificity. But 1 hypothesize that exactly the opposite is true." Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley' University of California Press,l9oo), 72.
⁶Other versions of the Zorro fifth include the Disney films and TV episodes from the fifties starring Guy Williams. the 19741V remake starring Frank Langella, the 1981 spoof lmTo, the Gay Blade starring George Hamilton, and the current Family Channel series. i. Dooley. The Man of Tomorrow," 30.
⁷Dooley, "The Man of Tomorrow," 30.
⁸Bill Boichel, "Batman, Commodity as Myth," in The Many U"", of Batman, 6.
⁹As I will explore later. The Mark of 20110 endures as a camp classic because of its de-ployment of dandyism and aestheticism. For more on the controversial link between camp. aestheticism, and gayness, see Jack Babuscio, "Camp and the Gay Sensibility," in Gays and Film, ed. Richard Dyer (London, British Film Institute, 197i, 1980),40-5i; Mark Booth, Camp (New York, Quartet Books, 1983); Michael Bronski, Culture Clash, The Making of a Gay Sensibility (Boston, South End Press, 1984); Philip Core, Camp' The Lie That Tell. The Tenth (New York, Delilah, 1984); Pamela Robertson, ''The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me: Mae West's Identification with the Feminist Camp," Cinema Joumal32. no. 2 (winter 1993): 5i-72.
¹⁰"The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender-indeed where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another." Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990), 135-36.
¹¹Butler writes, "Drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs properly to some other group, i.e. an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that gender is the rightful property of sex, that 'masculine' belongs to 'male' and 'feminine' belongs to 'female.' There is no 'proper' gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex's cultural property. 'here that notion of the 'proper' operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of a compulsory system." Butler, "Imitation and Gender Subordination," in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss (New York Routledge, 1992), 21. In her latest book, Butler makes the point that drag is not necessarily radical, even as it denaturalizes gender: "I want to underscore that there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reiueali7.ation of hyperbolic heterosexual noms. At best. it seems, drag is a site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes." Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York Routledge, 1993), 125.
¹²Lynn Spiegal, "Communicating with the Dead: Elvis as Medium," Camera Obsmra 23 (May 1991): 196.
¹³On this point, Butler writes, 'To claim that all gender is like drag or is drag, is to suggest that 'imitation' is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations." Bodies That .Hatter, 125. For more on same-sex drag, see Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in Cora Kaplan, ed., Formations of Fantasy (New York: Methuen, 1986),35-44; Louise Kaplan, Female Peroersions (New York; Doubleday, 1991).
¹⁴For more on the debate over gender identity and homosexual visibility, see Sue Ellen Case, 'Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic," Discourse 11, no. 1 (fall-winter 1988-89): 55-73; and Usa M. Walker, "How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are," Signs 18, no. 4 (summer 93): 866-89.
¹⁵Interestingly, "zorra," the feminine of "zorro:' has as a connotation "prostitute" and "whore" as well as "sly fox" and "vixen." If Diego's dandy persona is the "7..0rra," the feminine "zarro," we have another instance of transgressive sexuality inscribed within the film, only here it is female heterosexuality instead of male homosexuality. This coincides with the (at the time) popular conception of homosexuality as gender inversion.
¹⁶Eve Sedgwick comments on the sexual ambiguity of the masculine male within a homological institution like the military: "For a man to be a man's man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being 'interested in men.' Those terms, those congruences are by now endemic and perhaps ineradicable in our culture." Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985),89-90,
¹⁷Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1991),55-56.
¹⁸Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135.
¹⁹Ibid., 136.
²⁰The synecdoche of "blade" for "man" in 20110, the Gay Blade, the most recent movie remake of The Mark of2o1l0, makes the homoeroticism of the Zorro myth explicit. 21: The phrase is Marty Roth's, from his article "Hitchcock's Secret Agency," Camera Obsocura 30 (May 1992): 36.
²¹The phrase is Marty Roth's, from his article "HItchock's Secret Agency," Camera Obscura 30 (May 1992): 36
²²The notion of a monarchy controlled by its military is something of an anachronism for colonial Spain, and it is safe to say that this construction of good and evil far more reflects conditions in Europe during the thirties than conditions in California during the early nineteenth century. Many other movies of this time period rely on this narrative strategy. See, for instance, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1936) and The Son of Monte Carlo (1939). The political allegory of The Son of Monte Cristo is perhaps the most explicit of all the swashbucklers: George Sanders portrays a viIlainous general with a funny haircut, a small mustache, and a costume which looks suspiciously like an SS uniform.
²³Craig Owens, "Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism," in Men in Femini.²⁴The term is borrowed from Carole-Aone Tyler, "Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag," Inside/Out 36.