How Gays Lost It at the Movies
Kirp, David L.
Last spring, Cruising, a 1980 film about a serial killer who stalks the gay sex clubs of New York City, played before packed houses at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema. Little controversy attended...
...But the movies themselves have been assiduously scrubbed to efface the controversial...
...Doubtfire, supposedly straight men were camping it up out of necessity...
...Cruising is no peck-onthecheek film...
...He wanted to show that there was a place for everyone in America...
...Moviemakers are also turning to the cinematic staple of drag as a safe way to portray a slice of gay life...
...The Roxie Cinema caters to the tastes of its heavily gay audience, and it is hardly immune to the call of political correctness...
...Case closed...
...Although quiescence usually goes unnoticed, this non-event, in a community whose gay citizens know how to make themselves heard, deserves attention...
...Writer-director William Friedkin, who had made his reputation with The French Connection and The Exorcist responded to these criticisms by inserting a disclaimer amid the credits: "The film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world...
...The script for Wong Foo was written by an openly gay man named Douglas Carter Beane...
...It's a marker in the ever-shifting and ever-contested terrain of gay self-identity...
...But the assassination of San Francisco gay political leader Harvey Milk was a recent, vivid memory...
...Where is the wake-up call, the art that challenges consciousness, the Cruising for our times...
...Like most treatments of gay life that deserve to be called art, Cruising is more complicated than labels like homophobic or homophile suggest...
...That improbable disclaimer is presumably supposed to preserve his innocence...
...Even as Cruising has been rescued from the junk pile of sexploitation flicks, it has been marginalized as a period piece without contemporary implication...
...In classics like Some Like It Hot, Victor/ Victoria, Tootsie, and Mrs...
...openly gay artists and moneymen are enlisted in their making...
...Not only was it junk, gay activists argued, it was dangerous junk that threatened to stir up the already roiling pot of homophobia...
...It's also the reason that promotion for the film plugged its hyper-heterosexuality, reciting all the leading men from Tony Curtis to Robin Williams who ever put on a dress for the sake of a movie...
...When Cruising was being filmed, the angry gay voices were outsiders' voices...
...That isn't us, or at least most of us, our sex lives are actually much more beige—or so the argument went...
...The organizers of the anti-Cruising protests feared the movie might incite a new wave of anti-gay violence, much as those who now point to the menace of Hollywood's goremeisters believe that, sometimes, life horrifically imitates art...
...Gay sex, if it has any place at all, is offstage in these films, as taboo as blood and gore once was...
...That's just wrong, for the sexual meat rack is still functioning...
...During the opening credits, a severed arm surfaces in the Hudson...
...They wanted Hollywood to crank up its propaganda machine, to deliver a stream of gay Bill Cosby Shows in which gays were shown as just like everyone else, to seduce America into offering gays a place at the proverbial table...
...He perceives that he is changing and pleads to be taken off the assignment, but is bullied by his boss into staying on...
...Only a grinch could quarrel with Steven Spielberg's need to chuckle—or, for that matter, with Jonathan Demme's desire to make a film like Philadelphia that sands the rough edges of gay life in hopes of reaching, even converting, the kinds of audiences that the critics of Cruising had so feared a generation earlier...
...They go down on one another in darkened corners, and shove their fisted, Criscoed arms deep into the bowels of men who hang suspended in slings like so many slabs of beef...
...To the surprise and relief of the theater management, there was no picketing, no call for a boycott, when the film was shown...
...More remarkably, Cruising wasn't presented as a vintage piece of cinematic homophobia for audiences to hiss at, William Friedkin held up as a Leni Riefenstahl...
...It's as if the act of naming this relationship were bravery enough— as if Guess Who Coming to Dinner had been re-made, with Hanks as a gay Sidney Poitier...
...Politics above art, propaganda before integrity, makes for a dangerous business...
...Those demonstrations recalled the 1969 Stonewall riots, the Boston Tea Party of the American gay revolution, because on both occasions people who in the past had surrendered to the realities of power were acting in unprecedented ways to defend what they saw as a threat to their own identity...
...They don't think they're dragons or dragoons or drag racers...
...It's always easy to return to the scene of the crime," he wrote tartly, "once you know most of the witnesses are dead...
...It shows gay life in its vanilla as well as its kinkier versions...
...Rightly so, for Cruising turns out to be one of the most candid films ever made about gay America...
...None of this got much ink from the gay critics, though, for they were mainly furious about how sex gets depicted...
...Tom Hanks, as the young lawyer fired from a prestigious law firm when the partners suspect he has AIDS, acknowledges having had unsafe sex—but just once, years ago, at a time when, he insists, no one really knew how the AIDS virus was transmitted...
...Some anti-Cruising activists believed the film's verisimilitude was itself the problem...
...Then, the best that gays could hope for was a director like William Friedkin, who had a reputation for being "gay-sensitive...
...A handful of leathermen are stabbed after having sex, while the unseen murderer repeats the incantation: "You made me do that...
...Fifteen years later, the innocent decadence of the time depicted in Cruising has become a standard chapter in the annals of gay history...
...It is set in one small segment of that world which is not meant to be representative of the whole...
...Cruising let everyone in on the secret, and this was its sin...
...That's why Hollywood heartthrobs like Matt Dillon and James Spader, who know a good part when they see it, lined up for roles in Wong Foo, and why all the leads went to unimpeachably straight actors...
...But since mainstream America won't make such fine distinctions, this movie will just give the bigots one more excuse for their bigotry: that's why it should be boycotted...
...Fifteen years earlier, not to go was an act of gay solidarity, similar to the gay boycott of Minute Maid durWINTER • 1996 • 89 Gays and the Movies ing the late 1970s to protest the antigay politicking of Anita Bryant, the company's spokesperson...
...In many cities, demonstrators heckled moviegoers...
...Although there have been closeted homosexuals in Hollywood for as long as there has been a Hollywood, none spoke up during the brouhaha over Cruising...
...A naive young New York policeman played by Al Pacino goes undercover, bait to lure a serial killer who hunts his prey in the S&M world of leather bars, peep shows and parks...
...Fifteen years after the initial release ofCruising, its depiction of gay sex is still an eye-opener...
...Even more remarkable, though, is the aesthetic distance between the candor of Cruising and what now passes for cinematic gay sex, as well as the distance between that movie's harsh portrayal of antigay state authority and the dearth, these days, of political or social commentary...
...To condemn the film, sight unseen, would mimic the infamous example of Arlene Croce's treatment in the New Yorker of choreographer Bill T. Jones's dance piece on AIDS...
...It's a fun movie," Beane gushes in an interview in the Advocate, a national gay newsmagazine, "and when it's all over, you'll feel proud, which is my favorite thing...
...A reviewer for the Bay Area Reporter, a local gay paper, bemoaned the absence of outrage...
...Although such scenes had been filmed before, much wilder ones too, they were always in porn flicks targeted for an audience in the know...
...If this wasn't quite a masterpiece, the Roxie's blurb asserted, it was certainly a movie that told inconvenient truths, a film whose biggest problem was having been "conceived and born of a time too timid to deal with its own harsh realities...
...Not long before Cruising was shown, the theater management had scratched another film from its schedule when confronted by lesbians angry at how it portrayed them...
...But Wong Foo turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Spielberg...
...Instead, in its newly struck 35 mm print (the restrike itself an homage to artistry), the movie was billed as a serious and misunderstood work by an auteur...
...and later on a decaying torso is discovered...
...to see this film, they insisted, was itself a political act, an antigay act...
...and there was at the time a spate of unsolved gay murders in Greenwich Village...
...He becomes emotionally close to Ted, his gay neighbor, a would-be playwright who isn't part of the S&M scene...
...In both Strawberry and Chocolate and An Ordinary Man, the main character is a feckless, frustrated, asexual homosexual...
...The campaign for gay cinematic respectability has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those 1980 protesters...
...It's a staple demand of well-meaning organizations that look after the good name of Italians or Jews, Latinos or fundamentalist Christians, any group with a history of being caricatured by the image-makers and a perceived stake in the identity-politics game...
...Homosexuals were not, of course, first to the post in pushing for such artistic cleansing...
...Sex Clubs or Same-Sex Marriages...
...Such gender-bending—like Tom Hanks's being cast as a dying gay man in PhilaWINTER • 1996 • 91 Gays and the Movies delphia—is unthreateningly make-believe...
...From the news Hollywood brings, no one would suspect that sex for gay men has become a calculus of intimacy and death...
...In steering clear of risk, filmmakers are opting for stupefying solemnity, or else unthreatening silliness, not seriousness, in depicting gay life...
...He had been looking for a long time to address homophobia in America," says Beane...
...Gay sensibilities—and gay sensitivities—are now built into the process of making a movie...
...The outside has since moved inside...
...Yet, even though a tour of the gay tea rooms, back alleys, and sex clubs of any American city will turn up scenes that could have been lifted straight from the film, such scenes won't be playing anytime soon at your local theater...
...Other gay-themed movies of the past few years have replaced the simple fact of sex with the agonies of unsatisfied longing...
...Gay columnists urged a boycott...
...Now, however, it seemed prudent to determine for oneself whether the film actually had anything to say...
...Those first 90 • DISSENT Gays and the Movies years of the gay rights movement fit the zeitgeist, a "make love, not war" moment that joined sexual polymorphousness with grandiose politics, even within the ostensibly more sober crusades for racial and gender justice...
...Now it's acceptable to acknowledge, with toss-off lines like "What in gay hell...
...When Cruising first came out, it was trashed as a horror flick in which gays were the monsters, a piece of ungenteel slumming by hateful Hollywood...
...With its portrayal of gay men as secular saints, Philadelphia represents an act of contrition on the part of director Jonathan Demme, who had gotten in trouble for depicting the psychopathic killer on the loose in Silence of the Lambs as a frustrated homosexual (shades of Cruising...
...Besides, those of us who had stayed away were curious to see what the fuss was about...
...They know they're drag queens, right...
...Peep Show The plot line of Cruising is simple enough...
...Little controversy attended the week-long run at the city's premier revival house...
...There are many more big-bucks movies with gay characters nowadays...
...As the days the young cop spends in this netherworld stretch into weeks, his sex life with his girlfriend deteriorates...
...For the Roxie to revive Cruising, given the film's sordid reputation, was freighted with social meaning—it was as ifBirth of a Nation were to be shown in the heart of Harlem or The Eternal Jew in Skokie...
...they are as neutered as the lawyer in Philadelphia...
...He also said that he'd just come back from concentration camps in Poland and needed a laugh...
...A young cleric goes before his congregation in the climactic scene of Priest, seeking forgiveness for having had a loving (and fleetingly shown) affair with a man...
...Beane was floored when Steven Spielberg and Disney Studios got into a bidding war over the script...
...But what about all the untold tales, accounts of gay lives less perfect than the hero of Philadelphia, less hilarious than the drag queens in Wong Foo...
...The film constructs a precarious heterosexual identity for the policeman, contrasting the allure of the gay world with the sterility of straight convention...
...But that view was the decided exception...
...Or so it seems, but then Ted is murdered in circumstances that suggest that the young policeman— jealous of Ted's lover, unable to contain his own feelings—might be responsible for at least this last act of violence...
...It spins a pop-Freudian tale about the power of parental condemnation to turn fragile psyches into psychopaths...
...that the drag queen is in fact gay...
...In the 1994 box office hit Philadelphia, Tom Hanks is passionate about the opera while barely managing a hug for his lover...
...When The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which featured gay drag queens embarking on a road show in the Australian outback, became a surprise hit last year, Hollywood churned out To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything...
...Julie Newmar, which also features gay drag queens on the road, this time in Nebraska...
...Amid all the gay fluff on the screen, there's no way to detect the political threat, so much more menacing now than during the era of Cruising, which threatens Spielberg's faith in "a place for everyone in America...
...Eventually, the cop catches the killer, a graduate student unhinged by his father's rejection, and returns to his old life...
...And even as members of the S&M community watch out for one another, whether in their sex play or on the streets where the killer stalks, in Cruising it's the police, whose repeated acts of sadism against gays—against Pacino as well, when he seems to have "gone native"—are sanctioned by the state...
...In Hollywood, courage is measured in such teaspoonfuls...
...q 92 • DISSENT...
...Beane remembers wondering...
...Filming in the meatpacking district of Manhattan was dogged by street protests...
...Slowly, the murderer makes his presence known...
...If audience buzz is a fair gauge, most moviegoers could identify with the depiction of life in the gay fast lane a generation, and an epidemic, ago...
...In fact, although those who would sanitize depictions of gays lost the battle over Cruising, they have won the Hollywood war...
...When men kiss, their tongues scour and chafe one another's mouths...
...The rationale for such policing is understandable— the abuses of Hollywood have been vivid and gross—but the result is a victory neither for art nor life...
...The Sum of Us is a running joke about how a well-meaning, meddlesome dad can undermine his gay son's sex life...
...To watch the film now is to be sharply reminded that the scant dozen years between Stonewall and AIDS was driven more by the allure of sexual liberation— the newly won freedom to play as hard, as long and with as many people as one wished— than by the dream of civil rights, more fixated on sex clubs than same sex marriages...
...The lover is banished, the priest restored to celibacy, while a fellow cleric is having it off, entirely unapologetically, with the housekeeper...
...But then and now, the queens spend all their time primping and bitching...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
