The Surprise of A Knight - Assessment

Assessment

The Surprise of a Knight ushered in a brief period of homosexual hardcore pornography in the stag film era. About a year later, in A Stiff Game, an African American male would engage in fellatio on a Caucasian man without the need for drag. The appearance of gay sexual contact on film would soon end, however, and not reappear until the advent of legal gay hardcore pornography after 1970.

Thomas Waugh and Linda Williams have argued The Surprise of a Knight is a film fraught with interpretational difficulties. Williams notes the lead character (the "lady") is in costume, yet costumes are the antithesis of the hardcore pornographic film (in which nudity and the display of genitalia and penetration during intercourse are key). "The costume spectacle either steals the show..." as film historian Thomas Waugh put it, "...or becomes a grotesque distraction..." The revelation of the "lady's" penis is not real surprise, Waugh concludes, as audiences knew what sort of film they were getting (e.g., homosexual porn).

The use of drag in The Surprise of a Knight also distances the audience from the performers on screen, Waugh argues. The main character of the film is a drag queen, and yet nearly all the audience members could say they were not drag queens. Waugh see the film not depicting gay men on screen, but reaffirming heteronormativity and negative stereotypes of gay men and gay sex. John Robert Burger writes it is unclear from the film whether the visitor knows of the drag queen's gender before the encounter, and hiding the gender of the drag queen makes it "faux homosexuality". Burger also writes,The Surprise of a Knight is an exception to the norm of stag films, in which the receptive partner in same-sex anal sex is typically perceived to be victimized or punished.