Is Titanic a Lesbian Movie?
On Leo in the ‘90s and the Fashionable Lesbian Gaze
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe!
If you grew up gay in the 2000s and 2010s like me, you might remember a particular meme and its attendant Tumblr blog – Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber. This phrase was a joke, yes, but also reflects the notion that there have been, over time, various connections made between lesbians and certain male stars. Certainly, the Bieber meme was more of a gag than a profound attachment to the pop star himself, but there have been other moments such as these. More recently, sapphics have expressed an affection for Harry Styles, and in the 1950s, James Dean was something of a butch icon, as well as a gay one. (I’ve written about Patrick Swayze being this person for me).
In our recent cultural memory, however, there is one figure that seems to reign supreme, even today: Leonardo Dicaprio. Specifically, Leo in the ‘90s. (This is an important distinction, as present-day Leo has fallen out of favor with many for his unsavory dating history). Though modern-day Leo is no longer considered a heartthrob, his boyish 1990s image still permeates pop culture, circulated as it is in photographs and gifs online.
Leo’s appeal among sapphics is twofold. First, there are is movie roles – most notably Titanic, as well as Romeo + Juliet – in which his androgynous beauty and youthful vigor are on full display. Then, there is his overall look, his fashion, and his persona as a ‘90s heartthrob, which similarly place him as an aspirational figure in this era.
The biggest moment in Leo’s career, the movie that shot him to icon status and endeared him to legions of adoring fans, is undoubtedly the 1997 film Titanic. This film is also the source of much of the lesbian appetite for Leo, and it has inspired many a queer reading since then. Many have argued – including the author of this Cracked article – that Titanic is actually a lesbian love story, and that Jack himself is a lesbian (or trans, depending on your reading). Indeed, Leo was often described at the time as androgynous, and his androgyny is made even more apparent compared to the scruffy (often taller) men around him in the film. In addition, it is frequently made clear that Jack is out of place in the spaces he inhabits on the ship, and the secret of his “true” gender or sexuality would make this theme even more apt.
The moral of the film is also “totally queer,” according to Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma. Sciamma notes that Leo and Kate’s twin standing as ingenues, their lack of power dynamic, and even their positioning in the film’s sex scene make Titanic a queer love story. More importantly for Sciamma, whose own film in many ways echos Titanic, the moral of the story is that Jack taught Rose to be free, even though they were never able to truly be together. As Sciamma puts it, “In equality, there is emancipation.”
In this piece in Buzzfeed, writer Shannon Keating writes about how Dicaprio’s Jack awakened something in thousands of lesbians across the globe, even before they were able to put these feelings into words. Titanic was a film that was watched at sleepovers and birthday parties, with friends, with cousins. It was (and is) a universally beloved film, but it also stirred something in a generation of lesbians and sapphics that makes watching the film a different experience for us than for our straight peers.
Jack remains a compelling figure for us for so many reasons, his glimmering, youthful hope being one of them. There’s also the fact that he never ages, never becomes a “real boy” outside of that ship. As Keating puts it,
“Leo, like the guys in my actual life, keeps aging — growing into the kind of man I’m not remotely attracted to — but Jack lives on, a fixture of androgynous never-never land. He would remain forever trapped within Titanic’s bloated three-plus-hour running time just as he was confined only to Rose’s memories; he would always be sweet and innocent and safe, someone I could fantasize about ad nauseum but would never actually have to touch. That was his queer magic for me and for so many other girls, who later grew up and figured out what we’d really been looking for.”
Jack – and this Leo, the one from the ‘90s – is the perfect figure for this lesbian cross-identification, arousing feelings of desire, or aspiration, or both. To want to be with Jack (who in this context is a soft butch lesbian) is one side of the coin, to want to be Jack, and embody the freedom he enjoys, is the other. This Leo, who is young forever, is a fitting vessel for these desires.
Titanic was not the only text that created this connection between Leo and sapphics. His other films, as well as his general aesthetic, also engendered this relationship. The 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, which was popular but reached nowhere near the record-breaking success of Titanic, is one such text that has remained central in the lesbian imaginary. Leo plays Romeo, of course, but he is dressed as a Venice Beach cool guy rather than a 16th-century aristocrat. One look, in which Romeo wears a blue and red button-up (remember Tik Tok?) has had particular lasting power, with USWNT soccer player Kelly O'Hara and her girlfriend dressing as Romeo and Juliet for Halloween several years ago.
In general, fashion sense is a key component of what makes someone iconic within lesbian culture. This article by Erin Sullivan in Autostraddle, Weird But Legal Fashion Idea: Copy Outfits Leonardo DiCaprio Wore in the 90s, is an only slightly satirical look at how lesbian-ish some of Leo’s fashion choices look today. Another piece in Autostraddle, 15 Boys We Have Loved (When They Looked Like Lesbians), includes a list of ‘90s heartthrobs that lesbians might have crushed on for similar reasons, with Leo at the top of the list. One question in a popular lesbian subreddit asks, “how do i get young leonardo dicaprio hair?” Evidently, there is an element of longing here, an often playful, sometimes serious desire to attain the beauty (and, as it were, the confidence) that this Leo represents. His look, it seems, still holds a lot of power.
To be sure, ‘90s Leo is not iconic or aspirational to all lesbians. In fact, I got several incredulous and even angry responses on Reddit when I asked about whether Leo has a place in lesbian culture. But the act of looking, and the meaning of various images, is dependent entirely on context, and it does seem that many lesbians and sapphics have had similar experiences while looking at Leo. As Reina Lewis writes in her 1997 article Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery, “Meaning does not reside in the image itself, but is generated in the interaction between viewer and text in which the codes of the text will be more or less decipherable to different viewers, depending on their historical and cultural moment.”
Lewis herself notes that there is no such thing as a single “lesbian gaze” – because other factors such as race and class differentiate lesbians from one another – but the collective act of gazing in this way clearly has an effect on the makings of a subcultural language. Fashion has always been important to queer communities, as it can function as a means of identity formation and cultural recognition. As Lewis puts it, “Clothes have an importance in the lives of lesbians and gays - whether or not they consider themselves fashionable - that is rarely experienced by heterosexuals, however much they may affiliate to alternative networks of style and subcultural identities.”
It’s not as if there weren’t any visible butch lesbians at the time, of course. There was model and actor Jenny Shimizu, who in the late ‘90s dated Angelina Jolie, and of course the indomitable k.d. lang, who appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1993 with Cindy Crawford. Despite the importance that figures such as these must have had to lesbians at the time, these were individuals that young people might not have been exposed to in the same way that everyone was exposed to Titanic. The broad appeal and huge popularity of something like Titanic meant that Leo was someone everyone became familiar with, though young queers often had different reactions to him than their straight counterparts, as we’ve come to know.
Young lesbians and queer people were likely not the target audience for films like Titanic and Romeo + Juliet (unless James Cameron is secretly a gay ally), but Leo’s queer presence in films such as these created this audience, nonetheless. Titanic, in particular, had the effect of creating a communal queer viewing experience, one that was perhaps even unknown to the viewers themselves at the time.
Certainly, this does not mean we need to thank Leo or Cameron for their service to the lesbian community – I’m fairly sure neither of them particularly care one way or the other what we think. Rather, what I’m more interested in doing is thinking about what the popularity of figures such as ‘90s Leo reveals about ourselves, whether it be our experiences with gender envy, desire, or whatever else. It may be true that Jack will never grow up, but where does that leave us? With a better sense of fashion, I hope.