 Starring: Dean Cain, Timothy Olyphant, Zach Braff, John Mahoney
Director: Greg Berlanti
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: Aspiring photographer Dennis re-evaluates his life when he turns 28, deciding he wants more out of life than one night stands with random men. However he finds it tough to put more meaning into his existence as he’s surrounded by his gay friends, who have their own insecurities and problems, from being asked to donate sperm to a lesbian, to dealing with the break-up of a relationship. Then he meets young Kevin, who’s just coming to terms with his sexuality and needs the support of a gay friend, but can Dennis offer that without it just becoming about sex? |
Yesterday's Movie-A-Day article looked at the history of gay cinema from the earliest days of the silver screen through the Production Code era. Now it’s time to see what happened when openly gay characters were actually allowed on the screen from the mid-60s onwards. (I’d recommend reading
Gays On Film, A History - Part 1 before reading this article).
Broken Hearts Club was an attempt to make a mainstream gay movie several years before the likes of Brokeback Mountain, and starred known names like Dean Cain and Timothy Olyphant, although it didn’t do that well, largely because while it’s okay, there’s nothing particularly special about it. It’s actually a fairly interesting counterpart to Boys In The Band, which I’ll be talking about later in this feature, as both deal with a group of gay friends. However thankfully while 1970’s Boys In The Band made being gay seem utterly miserable and depressing, Broken Hearts Club is a much more modern take on the problems of gay life, which suggests homosexuality may have particular issues but isn’t quite as awful as the films from the early days of out gay people in cinema suggested.
The almost complete proscription on any overt mention or depiction of homosexuality in film lasted right up until the dying days of the Hollywood Production Code in the 1960s. Spartacus (1960) is famous for having a scene removed where Laurence Olivier’s Crassus propositions slave Antoninus (which has since been reinserted, with Anthony Hopkins providing Olivier’s lost dialogue). The scene never explicitly mentions sex, with Crassus merely saying that some like snails, others like oysters but he likes both. Unless you were tipped off as to what he meant, it’s unlikely 90% of the audience would have had a clue what he was on about (even if you do know, it still seems a little random), but even in 1960 this was seen a far too risqué and so got the chop.
While gay people didn’t officially exist in mainstream movies before the mid-60s, that doesn’t mean films weren’t being made by, for and about gays before then. While because of the Hays Code and the fact homosexuality was illegal these were understandably short underground efforts, often made for little or no money, they’re now fascinating looks at a time before there was any real acceptance of homosexuals, often made by angry, avant garde people who wanted to see some sort of depiction of their lives on the screen, even if they knew few would ever get to see the resulting movies. Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour (1950) is a surprisingly explicit look into the homoerotic fantasies of a bunch of prisoners (the whole thing is a metaphor for gay life at the time), and is now deservedly seen as a classic of gay cinema.
In America a young Kenneth Anger (author of the classic Hollywood Babylon) channelled his experience of being gay into the avant-gardes likes of Fireworks (1950) and Scorpio Rising (1964). Andy Warhol also did his bit, supporting movies like Paul Morrissey’s Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), all starring Joe Dallesandro. Because of the potential penalties, both in terms of someone’s career and possible jail time, there’s only a relatively small canon of early gay movies, but much of what exists is surprisingly interesting.
By the 60s the shackles were slipping though, as only a year after Spartacus, Samuel Goldwyn and director William Wyler had another go at bringing Lillian Hellman’s ‘The Children’s Hour’ to the screen, following their forcibly de-gayed These Three in 1936 (see yesterday’s Part 1 of Gays On Film for more info on this). In their 1961 version the allegations of lesbianism are muted but definitely there. While it was a step forward in many ways, it didn’t do much for the gay survival rate in film, as the character played by Shirley MacLaine, who is almost certainly a lesbian, joins the long list of cinema’s dead gay characters by hanging herself, while the probably straight character played by Audrey Hepburn, survives.
In 1962 Britain did its bit by making the first film English language film that dared to utter the word ‘homosexual’, in the Dirk Bogarde movie, Victim. The film was a big step forward in many ways, being among the first films to have a pro-gay agenda. However what was pro-gay in 1962, when homosexuality was still illegal on both sides of the Atlantic, looks practically medieval nowadays. The film’s position is pretty much that homosexuals are indeed terrible degenerates, but rather than hating them, they should be pitied and allowed to fester in their own mentally disturbed self hatred, without fear of blackmail or arrest, because they can’t help being diseased.
Right through the 60s and 70s it’s often amazing to see what passed for a pro-gay movie. 1970’s The Boys In the Band was the first Hollywood film dealing predominantly with gay characters and is therefore rightly seen as a major milestone. However the film itself is largely about a bunch of miserable, bitchy people, for whom the only person they hate more than everyone else, is themselves. However, while it’s easy now to look at movies like The Boys In The Band, with their self-hating homos, as negative depictions, it doesn’t mean they’re not accurate.
Matt Crowley, who wrote the play and screenplay of The Boys In the Band, has said the reason the characters in the film are the way they are, is because that’s what him and his friends were like. At the time being gay really was a massive problem for many people, who had to hide their sexuality for fear not just of being shunned from polite society, but possibly arrested, beaten up or even killed. For every Truman Capote who managed to flaunt their sexuality, there was a Montgomery Clift, drinking themselves to death and fighting a continual battle with a part of themselves they hated.
As gay consciousness grew through the 80s and 90s, a whole new subgenre – dubbed queer cinema – sprang up. The emergence of AIDS in particular galvanised gay filmmakers, with many films being made about how the disease had destroyed the sense of freedom many gay men had felt since the early 70s. However Hollywood still had a massive ambivalence to gay characters, and seemed unwilling to allow them to expand from the roles it had given them during the Production Code era.
Brian De Palma had a killer transvestite in Dressed To Kill (1980), while William Friedkin’s adaptation of the novel Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino as a cop investigating a serial murderer who frequents New York’s S&M bars, sparked protests even before it started filming, because of its perceived anti-gay bias. The result was that the studio felt pressured to put a disclaimer right at the beginning of the film, saying that the movie wasn’t an indictment of the gay lifestyle. Even so, many saw it as perhaps the most extreme example ever of the ‘evil gay’ movie, because whereas in the old days you had a single nasty gay character who couldn’t mention their sexuality, Cruising seemed to openly extend the stereotype to an entire community.
The sissy certainly hadn’t gone away either – they just didn’t have to hide their gayness anymore. For example, Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) does pretty much the same job as Edward Everett Horton did in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. The character is essentially asexual, merely allowed to provide arch comments and fashion advice, but never allowed to become a three-dimensional character. Indeed, you can almost see a movie like Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert (1994) as a reaction to the fact that Hollywood still likes to neuter its sissies.
In fact it’s not just the sissies who get desexualised either, as Hollywood is still very squeamish about suggesting that being a gay man isn’t just about sarcasm and bitchiness, while it’s also content with promoting the idea that lesbianism is mainly about titillating straight men. For example the makers of Philadelphia thought they were quite brave to even include a single brief kiss between Antonio Banderas and Tom Hanks, as they believed that even that would turn off a large chunk of the audience and ruin the effect of the entire film. Likewise on TV, in ‘Will & Grace’ the latter character flip-flopped through an almost endless succession of relationships, while Will remained relatively chaste, with hardly any of his relationships getting past a disastrous first date.
Most films with any real gay content have been independent productions, which may have crossed over to the mainstream occasionally, such as with Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, John Waters’ films and the aforementioned Priscilla, but which are generally only known to a very specialist audience. It’s often such a small audience that most gay people won’t have seen what are considered some of the classics of queer cinema, such as Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) and Bruce LaBruce’s Hustler White (1996).
But while it’s definitely a niche audience, there are enough people out there who want to watch gay arthouse movies that an entire distribution network has sprung up to cater to it. In recent years mainstream distributors have also started releasing more specifically gay themed movies, such as EIV (in the UK) distributing Hedwig And The Angry inch (2001) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), Paramount bringing out Queer Duck: The Movie and Universal releasing Shortbus, which even features gay men having ‘real’ sex.
There has been a massive change in the visibility of gay movies and characters in the past couple of decades (although it has to be said the majority of queer cinema efforts are rather amateurish – and you can read the Movie-A-Day article about Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to find out my thoughts on that), however there’s no doubt that mainstream film equality is still a long way off.
While there are occasional movies like Brokeback Mountain which focus on homosexual relationships and which break out of the gay ghetto, you’re still far more likely to see a gay man in a Hollywood film being the sarcastic, asexual sidekick, rather than the lead, while lesbians continue to either have sex to please voyeuristic straight men or become the butt of jokes for their butchness.
Hollywood is still scared of fully realised gay characters, largely because they’re afraid the audience won’t like them. Executives even blamed Superman Returns’ relative lack of success on the fact that pre-release publicity suggested the Man Of Steel wasn’t 100% heterosexual in the movie. While that sort of mentality remains, it’s gonna be a long time before there’s true screen equality for gay characters.
TIM ISAAC
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