“Marlene Dietrich lights a cigarette, straightens her bow-tie, and adjusts her top hat. Clad in a black tailcoat, she strides onto a modest stage. She is met with jeers. While she waits for quiet, the camera lingers on her sculptural face, sharply drawn eyebrows, and ironic smile. She saunters over to the audience, leans on a railing, and begins to sing. After the song, she accepts champagne from a male admirer, then spies the man’s date. She looks the woman up and down; the woman titters nervously. Dietrich plucks a flower out of the woman’s hair, lifts it to her face and smells it, then leans down suddenly, takes the woman’s chin in her hand and kisses her firmly on the mouth. The audience laughs and applauds, the woman hides her face in pleased embarrassment, and Dietrich smiles, sniffs the flower, and flicks the brim of her hat. Dietrich turns towards the audience and raises her hat, accepting the applause.
This scene from Morocco (Paramount, 1930) is one of the most famous cross-dressing scenes in cinema history. Queer viewers have embraced it as an isolated and cherished expression of lesbian desire and sensual androgyny. Alongside Greta Garbo’s cross-dressed monarch in Queen Christina (MGM, 1933) and Katharine Hepburn’s cross-dressed con woman in Sylvia Scarlett (RKO, 1935), Dietrich’s Amy Jolly is often characterized as one of the lone early representations of women cross-dressing and expressing desire for women in American cinema.”
-From Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, by Laura Horak
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