 Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Anna Faris
Director: Ang Lee
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist both get a job looking after sheep on Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain in the early 60s. During their isolation a bond develops that turns into a full-on love affair. Even when they leave the mountain and both marry women, they continue their relationship during shared holidays over the next 20 years. While Jack wants their brief, snatched encounters to become something more, the quiet and repressed Ennis doesn’t believe they could ever live together. |
Movie-A-Day returns and in a weird sort of coincidence, we’ve got two big gay movies in a row, starting today with Brokeback Mountain, which rewrote the rulebook on what gay films could achieve with mainstream audiences when it grossed $180 million around the world and walked off with three Oscars.
Then tomorrow there’s the gay rom-com The Broken Hearts Club, which was an earlier attempt to make a mainstream gay movie starring Dean Cain, Timothy Olyphant, Zach Braff (although before Scrubs) and several other recognisable faces, although it was a bit too generic and unmemorable to make much of an impact.
With these films coming one after another in the A-Z Movie-A-Day series, it seemed a good time to take a two-part look at the history of gay people in cinema, from the very earliest days up until now, which is, in my opinion, a rather interesting tale, although one that’s not that often told.
Talking about gay people in films is tricky. The reason for that is because for much of film history it was impossible to categorically say who was gay and who wasn’t. While it’s generally accepted that the sissy characters that were a quintessential part of 30s and 40s musical comedies, such as Edward Everett Horton in Top Hat (1935), were gay, it’s never explicitly mentioned. There was of course a good reason for that – homosexual acts were illegal and, indeed, it was one of the first things explicitly banned under Hollywood’s Production Code (AKA the Hays Code) in the early 1930s (it was classed as a sex perversion).
Sometimes it’s not even as easy being able to say that the character was gay but they couldn’t mention it. Take the 1895 movie that is now known as The Gay Brothers. It was made by Thomas Edison’s company as an experiment into sound filmmaking and features two men dancing. This is often taken as cinema’s earliest depiction of homosexual behaviour, but many have remarked that in the 1890s two men dancing wouldn’t have been particularly remarkable (it wasn’t until much later that men felt unable to get within three feet of one another for fear of being labelled gay) and that the film was an experiment, so they could have just got two blokes who worked at Edison’s factory to dance in order to prove the sound was synchronised.
Things don’t get much easier after the end of the Hays Code era either. While characters could be openly gay, there’s been endless debate over whether many of the gay characters in movies have helped or hindered how society sees gay people. For example, was Nathan Lane’s cross-dressing Albert in 1996’s The Birdcage portraying a positive role model who was openly defying society’s conventions of what it meant to be a man, or was it just asking people to laugh at a camp person and turning gay people into a stereotypical laughing stock? Likewise, did Tom Hanks in Philadelphia help bring gay characters into the filmic mainstream, or did he just perpetuate the age-old idea of the tragic gay character whose main job is to die by the end of the film?
The result is that there’s virtually no way to portray a gay character that will keep everyone happy – and that’s just among the people who think there should be gay characters in films in the first place (for example the United States Conference Of Catholic Bishops still rates nearly all films with significant gay content as ‘Morally Offensive’). Likewise, what was seen as enlightened in one era, seems detrimental and homophobic in another. As a result the gay character has become one of the most complex in film history, being both visible and invisible, sexualised and impotent, lauded and derided, and both mainstreamed and marginalised.
Gay characters have been around almost as long as cinema itself. While there may be debate over whether The Gay Brothers really were gay, by the 1910s no silent comedian’s canon was complete without at least one film where they appear in drag – a Chaplin did in A Woman – or where there was the hint of a same sex dalliance (although it would normally turn out that the object of affection was actually a girl pretending to be a boy). Silent film is rife with films and characters that play with sexuality and gender. Indeed stars like Rudolph Valentino and Roman Navarro became popular for their mix of the masculine and feminine. Some films were even bold enough to pretty much say if a character was gay, although not necessarily in a positive way, such as in Algie, The Miner (1912), where one of the characters is captioned as ‘One of nature’s mistakes’.
It’s also surprising that the first major male-male kiss came in the silent era. It wasn’t a minor film either. 1927’s Wings, which won the very first Best Picture Oscar, is also noted for the moment when Charles Rogers kisses Richard Arlen (in a platonic way), when the latter is dying.
It was partly because of the sexually androgynous and decadent characters that Hollywood had become fond of, that moral pressure was put on the studios to clean up their act. While both men and women swooned at the sight of Marlene Dietrich in 1932’s Morocco (1930), dressed in a tux and vamping it up on the stage for the delectation of both sexes, or Greta Garbo lustily kissing a chambermaid in 1933’s Queen Christina, the likes of the Catholic Legion of Decency were less impressed. As a result of the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code in the mid-30s, overt depiction of homosexual behaviour disappeared from the screen.
One of the first casualties was Lillian Hellman’s play ‘The Children’s Hour’, about two schoolmistresses dealing with a student’s allegation that they are lesbians. Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to the play and was promptly told by the Hays Office that by all means he could make a film of it, as long as there was absolutely no mention of lesbianism in it at all. The result was These Three (1936), which dealt with allegations of a very heterosexual love triangle and had a happy ending, rather than the play’s tragic one.
This happened to numerous books and play adaptations from the mid 40s through to the early 60s. Tennessee Williams’ plays generally had all overt mentions of homosexuality removed for the screen, from Blanche’s dead husband probably being gay in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) to the possibility of Brick and his dead friend Skipper having once been lovers in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958). However while anything explicit was removed, filmmakers weren’t afraid to push things as far as the Production Code would allow them.
While various characters asking about or inferring that Brick is a ‘queer’ were taken out of the adaptation of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, there are still hints about what was really going on for the members of the audience who were attuned to it. Likewise when Blanche talks about how soft and delicate her husband was, most in audience would have known what she was on about.
In fact the Production Code had an oddly contradictory effect. Because nobody could explicitly say a character was gay or do anything unambiguously homosexual, there was a rise in characters acting very gay, so that audiences would understand without having to be told. For example in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Joel Cairo arrives at Sam Spade’s office and we’re told his card smells of gardenias. The well-dressed character then minces into the office, and proceeds to talk while rolling his rather phallic walking stick around his mouth. Dashiell Hammett’s novel was far less ambiguous about Cairo’s sexuality, but because the movie couldn’t say it, the depiction ends up, in some ways, even more extreme, to ensure the audience knows what’s going on.
Cairo was also an early example of what became a staple of 40s and 50s cinema, particularly in film-noir – the evil homosexual. It was an era, particularly after the war, when men’s roles in society were changing and their position as lord of all they surveyed was under threat, hence the femme fatales of film noir, whose power and forthrightness threatens to emasculate the men and lead them down the wrong path. Alongside the femme fatales were the evil gay characters, who often slunk around the edges of the action like jackals, waiting to pick off the weak. The likes of Joel Cairo used their brains and wiles to get in the ‘real men’s’ way. Elsewhere Hitchcock offered Rope (1948), in which two young, gay lovers (although of course this fact isn’t explicitly mentioned), kill someone because they want to prove their superiority by getting away with the perfect crime. Luckily man’s man James Stewart is around to stop these effete young things.
Even the sissies had turned bad, with Clifton Webb’s (who was gay in real life) effeminate characters possibly murdering people in Laura (1944) and The Dark Corner (1946). Gay characters became a handy metaphor for anything outside the norm that society at the time disliked, with their sexuality being an easily identifiable signifier for a whole range of moral deviancy – if they were gay, who knew what other terrible things they might get up to? Many would argue that this is a stereotype that still lingers in Hollywood film, with protests having been sparked by lesbian femme fatale Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct (1992) and many seeing serial murderer Buffalo Bill as an affront to transgendered people in Silence Of The Lambs (1991).
However not all gay characters were evil, as many were too busy being fragile and suicidal. While Plato (Sal Mineo) could be said to be looking at Jim Stark (James Dean) and Judy (Natalie Wood) as substitute parents in Rebel Without A Cause (1955), it’s also easy to argue that he’s basically in love with Jim and that when that doesn’t go too well, he kills himself. Likewise in Tea And Sympathy, even the accusation that Tom Lee is a big sissy is enough to destroy him. The tragic gay is another type that many would argue is still around today, but disguised as Tom Hanks bravely dying of AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) or Jake Gyllenhaal getting the tire iron in Brokeback Mountain.
In fact gay people dying is a bit of a motif that Hollywood seems to love – normally because the characters are either too evil or too soft to live. Vito Russo’s book about the history of homosexuality in cinema, ‘The Celluloid Closet’, even ends with a necrology of gay characters in film, noting the numerous suicides and murders that have happened to homosexuals in the movies. It’s certainly impressive that for a group who didn’t even officially exist in films, gay people certainly died a lot in Hollywood movies.
In Part 2, we’ll take a look at what happened to gays on film after the end of the Production Code.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Bring It On - Or, why we can blame this movie for most of the crappy teen flicks of the past few years
NEXT: The Broken Heart’s Club - Or, gays on film, a history - Part 2
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
