On June 16, 2014, I was a recently turned nineteen-year-old, preparing to watch Flesh and the Devil at home. My impression of silent cinema—a world I had been delving into for only a couple of years—was that of a cinematic realm contained within normative limits.

Indeed, for much of cinema history, access to representative media has been extremely limited for LGBTQ+ audiences. To circumvent these constraints, queer cinema-goers have developed alternative approaches, aiming to draw relatable and compelling content out of unfriendly grounds.

In their book Queer: A Graphic History, Meg-John Barker explains the notion of queer reading, or queering, as the act of “rendering a text queerer by reading it in a certain way” given that “there’s never one ‘true’ reading of any text—not even the one the author intended. Rather, there are always many possible readings, and the reader is implicated in the meanings that are (re)produced”.

Adapted from Hermann Sudermann’s 1894 novel The Undying Past (Es war in German), Flesh and the Devil premiered in December 1926, and opened in theaters in early January 1927. The story of a love triangle between two close friends—Leo and Ulrich (John Gilbert and Lars Hanson), and Felicitas (Greta Garbo, in her breakthrough role)—couldn’t be straighter at first reading. Leo and Ulrich are two young German soldiers from noble families; Felicitas is the woman who intrudes between them, leading to chaos and tragedy.

But on that day in 2014, when the film started rolling, I was blown away. The relationship portrayed on-screen was, indeed, a romance: a love story between the two main male characters.

I’ve seen many silent films since then, including several with canonical LGBTQ+ Asta Nielsen’s films, starting with Hamlet (1921), her glorious Shakespearian androgyny. I bobbed my hair after developing crushes on nearly every silent film actress that lived, in a classic ‘do I want her or do I want to be her’ move. But I have returned to Flesh and the Devil time and again.

In addition to the delightful campiness and high drama, which would be reason enough for a rewatch, with each revisitation I identified new examples of closeness and intimacy between the two male protagonists. Inadvertently at first, I was developing a queer reading of the film. But I was also building something of my own, the importance of which I have only grasped recently.

The story goes like this (spoilers, obviously): Ulrich wakes up at the army barracks and realizes that his best friend Leo didn’t spend the night there. He immediately takes emergency measures to prevent the officers from noticing Leo’s absence and to protect him. After Leo returns, the two keep pretending that he is sick and, believing that they have fooled the Captain, they dance and embrace.

When asked by Leo’s mother to explain this, a flashback shows how the men had travelled to the island as boys to be united in a blood-mixing ritual that young Hertha had officiated, dressed in a white robe. The intertitle displays their vows: “In riches and in poverty… in love and in sorrow… in life and in death.” Yes, this is a wedding. Yes, they’re basically married.

From here, the story progresses towards a dramatic twist, when Leo meets Felicitas again at a party and they begin an affair that is quickly discovered by Felicitas’s husband. Leo kills him in a duel and must go into exile, without Ulrich knowing the reasons for the confrontation. When Leo returns years later, he finds that Ulrich has married Felicitas. Drama ensues, with Leo in a constant state of emotional turmoil over Felicitas’s presence, and Ulrich becoming increasingly distraught over not understanding exactly what is going on. (At one point, Felicitas even begs Leo to pay more attention to Ulrich, because he is getting ill without him.)

Throughout the escalating conflict, both men keep engaging in moments of shared physical affection. After Felicitas suggests cheating on Ulrich and Leo is caught angrily attacking her, the dramatic climax arrives with a face-to-face confrontation. Ulrich challenges Leo to a duel to the death, at, naturally, the ‘Isle of Friendship’.

At the last moment, Felicitas comes to regret what she has caused and runs to prevent them from killing each other, but she ends up falling through the ice and drowning. Meanwhile, Ulrich and Leo’s duel is interrupted by a montage of previous scenes of them together.

As if awakening from a trance, they both drop their guns and approach each other. Ulrich takes Leo’s hands and, looking at him, declares: “Everything is suddenly clear to me… as if a veil had lifted.” Leo’s reply: “I know. I felt it too.”

The film ends with the men embracing, seemingly on the verge of falling together onto the snow.

Flesh and the Devil’s homoerotic connotations have been both acknowledged and categorically denied from the very start. In an interview with journalist Scott Eyman, director Clarence Brown mused about the film’s ending with a crude reflection: “How do you have the woman die and the men embrace without making them look like a couple of fairies?” This homophobic quote was referenced by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet (1995) to exemplify how close relationships between men on-screen have always been accompanied by fear of interpretations that could transcend hegemonic masculinity, how this has led to strategies of restrictive denial and, above all, how this denial often comes apart at the seams upon close examination.

How does the mainstream narrative around a film evolve historically? In the case of Flesh and the Devil, it has been inevitably colored by the historical romance between John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, a narrative that insists on how their chemistry on-screen mirrors their real-life relationship.

Shrouded in myth and anecdotes of dubious credibility, the story goes that the two began a ionate relationship while shooting this film, that they moved in together immediately afterwards, and that they got engaged after he asked her several times. And then, of course, the scandal that exploded after she failed to show on their wedding day.

This is, perhaps, best understood in the context of Greta Garbo being renowned for having had her most significant relationships with women; she has long been claimed as a lesbian icon. Under a conscious queer eye, Felicitas’s role as a seductress of men is easily countered by the intertextual reading of Garbo as a sapphic symbol.

Throughout my seven years of Flesh and the Devil repeat viewings, the friction between the film’s historically heteronormative public circulation and its underlying subtext has kept fascinating me. In my quest to unravel the reasons behind this dichotomy, I examined the source material, Sudermann’s novel, with a friend; these are some of our favorite quotes from the book:

“I needn’t assure you that I love you today as much as I ever did.”

“Now all I want is to hear you calling me ‘little girl’ and then I shall feel old times have really come back again”. “I will call you so if you like,” Leo replied.

“Leo you know that I cling to you as to a part of my own body.”

“The desire to overtake Ulrich, to hold his hand for a second in his, gained such sudden ascendency over him that everything else receded into the background.”

“He had caught Ulrich’s head in his arms, and began massaging his scalp vigorously with his finger-tips. After a few seconds the eyes recovered their ordinary expression, a gentle flow of blood mounted to his temples, and he came to himself again.”

My reading of the film has been enriched in other ways too. Sharing Flesh and the Devil has been as important to me (dragging people along to watch the film and explaining its deal to everyone I know has become a personal ritual) as discovering its impact on others. In 2011, for example, the recognition of same-sex marriage in Ireland was celebrated at the Dublin Film Qlub with a screening of Flesh and the Devil, applauding the depiction of a gay wedding in a silent film.

Talking to Bonnie about Flesh and the Devil, they told me:

“The embraces, the long stares, the palpable excitement between the two men is as ionate as any of the interactions between Gilbert and Garbo; this is so obvious I find it hard to believe it’s not somewhat intentional. I think I enjoyed the film and their relationship so much simply for this; you subconsciously just know they are supposed to be together.

“Imagine if either of the actors were substituted for an actress. The undertone of unexpressed love would be abundantly clear—perhaps that would be due to a heteronormative perspective that assumes men and woman always have to be romantic, but it is also a testament to the way their interactions are written and played.

“As a queer person who loves the classic film era and so desperately seeks a ‘true’ and fulfilling love, I find the film so enjoyable. The ‘happy ending’ of the film feels very validating and satisfying, a small triumph that a forbidden love and way of life can ‘win’, even if it’s not able to be proudly stated.”

The constant search for meaningful and fulfilling content would be familiar to anyone who has struggled with their identity. Interestingly, the exercise of introspection that nearly any LGBTQ+ person has undertaken at some point seems to me akin to the process of watching a silent film for the first time. Similar to re-examining past experiences under a new light, silent cinema requires taking a leap into uncharted waters and becoming acquainted with unfamiliar forms of expression. You move forward by paying attention to detail and questioning assumptions. But there’s also a factor of pure emotionality, of trusting what you are seeing and experiencing.

For a long time, I struggled with labels and fixed definitions of who I was. I felt like I was overflowing every clearly delineated boundary that I tried to fit within, but the idea of not matching conclusively any pre-existing notion of a sexual identity was terrifying. The surprising thing is that, nowadays, ambivalence is starting to feel reassuring to me. And it’s liberating to look at a film from 1926 and be able to reject restricting assertions and categorical affirmations about what is valid, focusing on building one’s own meanings instead.

I have spent nearly a decade obsessing over Flesh and the Devil, searching for clues beneath its predominantly perceived straightness. Excavating subtext, and unearthing meanings on behalf of a queer reading. But this year, I’ve also spent June reflecting on the film and the meaning it holds for me.

A couple of weeks ago I watched it again, and a new revelation unfolded. Perhaps, by now, my relationship with the film has shifted from a one-way-affair. Leo and Ulrich as a couple will always exist in the delicate intersection between mainstream textuality and redefining possibilities. But they matter, as the interpretive structure me and others have built around them matters—along with everything that’s been gained in the process.

Flesh and the Devil is my personal Pride celebration. I claimed it years ago as a queer classic and I invite everyone to share it with me as such. A veil has lifted. Happy Pride.