Queering Cinema: 'Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?' in 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'

The 1953 Technicolor classic "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" might best remembered for its iconic "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number featuring Marilyn Monroe at the apex of her stardom, but there's another song in the film with costar Jane Russell that might go down as one of the gayest (or at least homoerotic) moments in musical history.

"Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" finds Russell surrounded by a group of men wearing bathing suits matching their skin tone. As explained earlier in the musical, the hunks are actually Olympians-in-training on the same transatlantic cruise as Russell and Monroe – but that doesn't stop Russell's character Dorothy from lusting after them... but they couldn't be less interested in the 50s sex symbol. In the number, Russell pines for love as the athletes perform a number of eye-popping stunts around her, paying her no mind. It ends with a bunch of the men diving into a pool and knocking her into it (a mistake that director Howard Hawks decided to keep in the film's final version).

Film Comment's Michael Koresky wrote about "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in 2018 and discussed the "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" number, calling it the "crux of the film's queerness" and its "most blatantly 'gay' scene.'"

"Not long after boarding the ship, Dorothy intrudes upon the men's exercise routine, haplessly trying to get noticed by the gaggle of gorgeous, muscular athletes, all stripped to tiny, flesh-colored briefs as they flex, stretch, lift, and generally swan about the ship's gym and pool," Koresky writes. "It's a 1950s physique pictorial magazine come to life, and if there's anything that doesn't belong in one of those, it's a woman. (Gentlemen prefer to be left alone?) These gender-flipped bathing beauties ignore her as she sings the title question again and again; at one point, as she brandishes two tennis rackets, they turn their asses to her in a rude parody of a kick-line; and, in the final insult, the men dive right over her head into the water.

"The central joke of the scene is that busty Russell, who had been a major American sex symbol since her breakthrough in Howard Hughes's sultry 1943 western 'The Outlaw' (which Hawks had worked on as uncredited co-director), would be ignored by a room full of virile all-American males, all of whom would rather keep their eyes on the prize," he adds. "While the choreography and composition of many Golden Age Hollywood musical numbers are identified by a certain mechanical quality that can be read as decidedly asexual (for example, the physical formations of women's bodies in Busby Berkeley's films of the 1930s, or the 'clowning' scenes between men and women in "Summer Stock" and "On the Town"), "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" is unique in the way it homoeroticizes while simultaneously defusing hetero chemistry at every turn."

Check out the scene below.