Nosferatu’s Gay Secret: The Story Behind a Photograph

By Jude Jones

When archivists were going through the personal photographic collections of the late Hollywood director F. W. Murnau, the cinematic genius behind many a seminal film including the original Nosferatu, the made a queer discovery: a series of nudes of an unidentified young man, his body lean and brown hair suggestively coiled. The photographs, both erotic and playful, were later released to the public, however their sensual, mischevious patina occludes a tragic melodrama that profoundly shook 1930s Hollywood.

Nosferatu F.W. Murnau gay

One of four mysterious nudes found in Murnau’s photographic collections.

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Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu was not a very gay film. With all its insistence on female nudity and virgin sacrifice, it at times felt more heterosexual erotic thriller than earnest Gothic homage. At a cursory glance, it might be easy to conclude this was not Eggers’s fault. He was following the cues of his base material after all, F. W. Murnau’s 1922 German masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, a cinematic landmark over-a-century old and very much shaped by the reactionary mores of its time. However, the Nosferatu story, until Eggers, was abundant with queer little secrets, especially for those who care to dig a little further.

Bram Stoker, the author of Nosferatu’s macabre source in his 1897 novel Dracula, once wrote obsessive fan letters to Walt Whitman, the famous bard of so-called “manly love”, and was struck by inspiration for his novel while reading Carmilla, a serialised short story recounting the adventure of a swooning lesbian vampire. F. W. Murnau meanwhile, the original Nosferatu director, lived as a closeted gay man, leading a tumultuous and tortured existence of cardinal secrets and whispered relationships until his untimely death at the age of 42.

Born in the Prussian textile town of Bielefeld in 1888, Murnau studied philology, art history, and literature at university before being conscripted into the German Army at the Great War’s outbreak. Murnau was originally deployed on the Russian front and served there with his close friend and lover, the aristocratic Jewish poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, who had earlier been the one to introduce Murnau to expressionist cinema. Tragically however, Ehrenbaum-Degele would not survive the brutalities of the battlefield and, following his death, Murnau would be redeployed as a gunner in the German Army’s Flying Corps, during which time he survived eight plane crashes and was detained as a prisoner of war.

This continual proximity to death and destruction reshaped Murnau’s relationship with life, a theme explored in his (now lost) debut 1919 film The Boy in Blue – inspired in-part by Oscar Wilde’s A Portrait of Dorian Gray and named for the Gainsborough painting of the same name, often used by his gay contemporaries to signal their sexuality – and in his more famous 1922 sophomore, Nosferatu.

An extremely experimental work endowed to the disquieting surrealism of earlier films in Germany’s Expressionist canon like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the silent movie was a wider reflection on the existential anxieties of a German population reeling from the black shadow of both the war and the Spanish flu pandemic, depicting a quaint German town terrorised by a supernatural plague: that of the Nosferatu.

The film, although originally struck down by Stoker’s wife for copyright infringement, made Murnau an ascendant star. By 1926, he had already immigrated to Hollywood with an impressive resume and soon directed Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), still regarded as one of the most important American films of all time. At the same time, though, Murnau sunk slowly into the city’s sordid queer underbelly. ‘Few around the Fox lot,’ remembered queer Hollywood historian Kenneth Anger in his infamous 1961 Hollywood Babylon, ‘had not heard that director F.W. Murnau favored gays when it came to casting.’

Nosferatu F.W. Murnau gay

Nosferatu F.W. Murnau gay

David Rollins poses nude for F. W. Murnau, ca.1927-8.

It was during this period that Murnau first met David Rollins, a young, Missouri-born actor who, with his softly tussled hair and boyish All-American looks, was one of the industry’s earliest heartthrobs. Murnau was reportedly enamoured by the young star from early on and described him as ‘a great friend of mine’ in interviews, regularly inviting the young man to his home, the historied Wolf’s Lair Castle, where he encouraged him to pose for his camera by the pool, steadily more unclothed.

Ostensibly, this was casting direction: Murnau was at the time considering Rollins for a role in his 1928 film Four Devils (although Rollins, ultimately, was never picked) in which four precocious orphans become circus stars. Despite the implicit imposition of eroticism though, the photos also show a mutual, self-aware, and playful touch. Many of them, through movements of the body and plays of composition, reference famously homoerotic works like the antique Boy with Thorn statue, in which a cherubic young naturalist meticulously attentively tends to his foot. (The German sculptor Gustav Eberlein had made an infinitely more pornographic version in the 1880s, in which the now Bacchus-like boy’s face appears in orgasmic ecstasy as dotingly clasps the pedal extremity).

Rollins – who would post-Murnau live much of his life with the great American author John Blair Linn Goodwin – later commented that the director’s insistences on capturing him nude confused him, but that he was happy to play along and felt comfortable enough to do so. Furnau therefore got his way in time, successfully convincing Rollins to model for him totally naked, his svelte, modestly muscled body on inglorious display. Rollins, though, never stated whether he had been romantically involved with Furnau and, when the director passed away just four years later, he is not noted as having attend the funeral.

Nosferatu F.W. Murnau gay

David Rollins poses for Murnau in emulation of “Boy with Thorn”. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek—Sammlung Murnau. Retrieved from Cabinet Magazine.

It would be Furnau’s death that exposed him to much of Hollywood as a homosexual. The as Anger further recounted, Murnau died suddenly in a car crash, where had had allegedly ‘hired as valet a handsome 14-year-old Filipino boy named Garcia Stevenson.’ ‘The boy, he continues, ‘was at the wheel of [Murnau’s] Packard when the fatal incident occurred.’

It was circulated that Murnau was having sex with the underage boy at the time of the crash, and the scandal left the once revered director’s name in a state of disgrace. At his funeral, only 11 people attended. Greta Garbo, the iconic Golden Age actress, was among them and famously had a death mask of Murnau made, which she kept in a drawer at her desk for the remainder of her Hollywood years. She would later give the mask to Murnau’s family and the ghostly relic can today be found in Berlin’s Filmmuseum.

Rollins, meanwhile, would outlive Murnau for another fifty years. By April 1937, Rollins had moved in with Goodwin, the two registering a joint address in New York City. By 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbour dragged America into Europe’s second Great War, the two had moved back to California together. Rollins was, by that point, retired from acting following a brief, unsuccessful stint on Broadway and started work as a farmer. Goodwin, meanwhile, continued writing and lived a cosmopolitan intellectual lifestyle, winning several mentions in Christopher Isherwood’s diaries. However, their relationship appears to have dissolved with the close of the Second World War, the two subsequently taking on separate residences and Goodwin taking on a new lover as well, one Anthony P. Russo. Rollins, to conclude his story, died in 1997 in relative obscurity, his ashes being scattered silently into the Pacific Sea by loved ones.

Murnau’s photos of Rollins were found in Murnau’s private collections in 2013, shining a light, however dim, on the director’s tumultuous and secretive erotic life.

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Author

  • Jude Jones is an award-nominated journalist and writer, as well as the Managing Editor at GAY45. Their writing covers art, music, fashion, and culture and they have bylines in publications including the Cambridge Review of Books, The Cold Magazine, New Wave Magazine, and more. Keep up with their work on their Instagram, @jude_j0nes2002.

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