Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If David Cronenberg had ever made a body horror film with Merchant Ivory Productions, it might have become Lillies Not for Me, a tale of self-hatred, gay repression, and turn-of-the-century medical barbarism with roots in actual events.
In the film, Owen James (Fionn O’Shea) reunites with Philip, a former schoolmate who has become a doctor. While spending an idyllic summer together in a remote cottage by the sea, the pair feel a growing romantic attraction to each other.
Their growing happiness, though, is hampered by Philip’s belief that his attraction to men can and should be cured. In the end, the pair strike a peculiar bargain: Philip will fully embrace a romance with Owen for a time … but after a certain deadline passes, Philip will require Owen to attempt to cure his friend’s homosexual urges with a procedure Philip and his colleagues have developed. If the operation proves successful, Owen must agree to undergo the surgery, as well.
I don’t want to reveal too much, so for now, I’ll just say that when the deadline arrives, the situation at the summer cottage vacillates between heartbreak and horror. Monstrous events occur … but it’s clear the real monsters are those whose certainty about what’s best for others blinds them to the atrocities they commit.
As a screening in Clyde’s and my Sunday afternoon “Bad Gay Movie Theatre” series, Lillies Not for Me is a total failure … because this film is in no way a bad gay movie. Instead, it’s a chilling, effective, and haunting story; even as I write this, I’m still not over it.
Based upon Actual Events
In the 1910s and 20s, Eugen Steinach confidently asserted that “defective” testicular tissue caused homosexuality … and set about “curing” homosexuals with testicular transplants from heterosexual donors. (His work echoes that of John R. Brinkley, a quack who made money “curing” men of all kinds of “male weakness,” including homosexuality, with goat testicle transplants.)
Steinach’s work was celebrated as, um, cutting edge at the time. Colleagues of Sigmund Freud praised the approach. His later investigations into how sex hormones influenced physical development would ultimately influence medical procedures for gender reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy. He was nominated multiple times for — but never received — the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Though considered mainstream medicine at the time, Steinach’s efforts to change sexual orientation via testicular transplant surgery were doomed from the start. The body rejects gland transplants, and by the late 1920s, researchers and doctors discounted Steinach’s tales of success. By 1934, he had abandoned the procedure as orientation reassignment surgery and shifted to marketing it as a way older men might restore their declining vigor.
Decades later, the American Psychological Association would conclude that all conversion therapies are unscientific, shame-based procedures that increase depression, anxiety, and suicide rates. Even so, faith-based practitioners all over America continue to inflict conversion therapies on LGBTQ people.
For me, that’s the enduring horror of Lillies Not for Me: the same haughty certainty that drove Steinach’s scalpel still drives today’s conversion therapists — the unshakeable conviction that vulnerable people must be fixed, evidence be damned.
