Kissing Brad Davis

Scott McKinnon

In the well-to-do Sydney suburb where I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was a single-screen movie theatre where my film-loving mother and I would often spend our Saturdays. Inside was a grand staircase, swirling up from the box office on the ground floor to the theatre doors. The cinema was usually dotted with grey-haired old ladies from the nearby retirement village, sitting there with me and my lovely mum taking in an afternoon matinee. I was a shy, anxious kid, but when the lights went down and the curtains parted, nothing mattered except the movie.

Apart from at a cinema, the only other way to see movies was on television, and I’d scan the newspaper TV guide religiously each Monday to plan my film schedule for the week. When I was in my early teens, we bought our first VCR and I would go to the local video store as often as I could, gathering a pile of weekly rentals to work my way through. When a film was good, I would often rewind it immediately and start over, or just track back to a favourite sequence, holding the rewind button down and then running the scenes through, again and again.

I watched countless movies and TV shows. Dramas and comedies, mysteries and musicals. Saturday-morning cartoons and Sunday-night movies of the week. Event miniseries and blockbuster debuts.

Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lives lived on the screen, and all of them straight. At best they contained a hint of something shadowy that couldn’t quite be brought into focus. Every kiss I saw, every romance, every single scene of love and intimacy and passion was between a man and a woman. The kind of relationship that I would eventually have was entirely absent. It was so absent that for a long time I didn’t even know I missed it or that I might search for it. An enormous amount of effort went into making sure that queers would never be visible to children.

Images of gay love existed somewhere, certainly but, like a town that has been left off the map, they played no role in how I imagined the world to be. When I was born, in the 1970s, lesbian and gay liberation movements were in full swing, and newly relaxed censorship laws allowed queer movies like Sunday Bloody Sunday, A Very Natural Thing and the previously banned The Boys in the Band to appear in Australian cinemas. The risqué soap opera Number 96 cheerfully shocked television audiences with the first openly gay and transgender characters on Australian TV. Gay male pornography was even making quasi-legal appearances in disreputable inner-city screening rooms. There were plenty of images of gay male sexuality emerging . . . somewhere.

But all of these screen entertainments were strictly for adults only. Even the simplest of kisses between men was considered so shocking, even pornographic, that it could never be permitted to appear in a movie accessible to kids.

The ‘won’t someone think of the children’ brigade will claim that I was being carefully prevented from becoming ‘prematurely sexualised’. Protecting children from adult sexual images may be a worthy goal, but I certainly wasn’t safeguarded from seeing all forms of sexual desire. Children’s entertainment was a hotbed of heterosexuality. The central romance in Lady and the Tramp ensured that I had seen a loving kiss between two animated dogs before I witnessed one between two human males. Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo saw the heroic little Volkswagen fall for a sexy powder-blue Lancia named Giselle, revealing that even cars had heterosexual desire in kids’ films. Of course, a core component of Disney fairytales like Cinderella and Snow White is Prince Charming on the hunt for a kissable heroine. And Miss Piggy’s feelings for a somewhat startled Kermit were nothing short of barefaced, voracious lust.

What I was prevented from seeing was anything between people (or cars, or animals) of the same gender. The sequestering – that is, the censoring – of even relatively chaste queer images as the province of the ‘adult’ and the ‘sexual’ meant that heterosexuality was the only imagery available to kids like me. Queer youngsters had to make do with lives as subtext in a world keen to pretend we didn’t exist at all.

My budding sexuality positioned me as a subtext, yes, but the colour of my skin placed me unquestioningly at the centre of almost every movie I watched. As a white kid in Australia at that time, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that someone else might be missing from the screen; for queer kids of colour, the whiteness of both Hollywood and Australian cinema added further layers of absence.

From the movies I voraciously consumed as a child and as a teen, certain moments linger in my memory as landmarks in my halting sexual and romantic education. Those small, intriguing scenes and images, the likes of which many a queer person will be able to call up as a recollected marker point, caught my attention and suggested, ever so briefly but with vital consequence, that there was something I wasn’t being told.

Watching the early-’80s Australian movie musical Starstruck on VHS, I remember the single moment that caught my eleven-year-old attention: in one short scene, two male characters float on a li-lo in a rooftop swimming pool, wearing nothing but matching blue Speedos and with their legs casually touching. To adult viewers, the moment was intended to very plainly indicate the homosexuality of these characters, and we see the disappointment register on the face of the female lead, the rising rock star played by Jo Kennedy, who had been hoping to attract the romantic interest of one of them. To me, sitting on my beanbag in our family living room, none of that was clear and my lasting memory is only of those two legs touching.

I had, to that point, watched men punch, shoot, stab and otherwise harm one another in any number of imaginatively violent ways, but this was the first time I had seen affection between two men expressed as an indication of sexual or romantic desire. Those two legs touching was a form of male physical intimacy that I had never seen before and it was fascinating. Instead of wanting to harm one another, these men were enjoying a shared moment of easy, sensual touch.

My own desires were gradually, confusingly, disconcertingly taking shape: a crush on a student teacher who all-too-briefly taught at my primary school; a post-match visit to a rugby league locker room that was far more interesting to me than the game itself; the smiling male underwear models who, compared to their seductively posing female counterparts, seemed slightly shame-faced standing in only their jocks in the pages of department store catalogues. Beyond these occurrences, it was TV and movies that provided opportunities to look unguardedly at men. In Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson climbed out of bed and walked across a room naked and it was just . . . bloody . . . great (rewind, watch again, rewind, watch again, rewind, watch again). Rob Lowe in About Last Night, Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing all provided thrilling, if undefinable and puzzling, moments for me. But even in those moments, something wasn’t right: these men were sexy, sure – sometimes shirtless and yes, occasionally even naked. But they were just glimpses. The blokes never lay languidly in their underwear or slowly undressed while the camera traced their flesh and the soundtrack piped sexy ’80s saxophone. The hero always had to be somewhere in time to kill someone. I was a feminist film critic on training wheels, wondering why the camera only ever offered women as objects of desire.

I’m not sure when I first saw two men kiss onscreen, but it may well have been Midnight Express. I was twelve or thirteen and, while my parents were on holiday, my aunty Wendy and her boyfriend Phil came down from Tamworth. Midnight Express, the harrowing, and somewhat controversial, late-’70s prison drama is most definitely not a kids’ film, but Wendy grabbed it from the video store and allowed me to watch. Adapted for the screen by Oliver Stone, the film tells the true story of a young American student imprisoned in Turkey for attempting to export hashish. The film’s star, Brad Davis, beautiful and, more than once, naked, intrigued me. In a steamy prison shower scene, Davis is kissed by a fellow inmate. I was quietly awestruck, while Phil expressed his discomfort: ‘I think he’s turning a bit weird, Scott.’

Phil was a good guy, and his ‘bit weird’ was fairly mild, but there were few straight Aussie blokes at the time who could let such a moment pass without some kind of comment – a cautionary notice. The film itself echoed that particular lesson: Davis pulls away from the kiss and gently but firmly shakes his head; no, the all-American hero will not participate further in such activities. Never mind that the memoir upon which the film was based details a loving romantic and sexual affair between Davis’ character and that fellow prisoner. Never mind that Davis himself was bisexual.

The movie obsessions of my childhood and teen years reveal an unwitting – if, retrospectively, all too clear – fascination with subtextual queerness. I loved the 1987 horror comedy The Lost Boys, in which teen idol Corey Haim (with a Rob Lowe poster on his bedroom wall, no less) tries to defend his hunky big brother, played by Jason Patric, from being recruited to a gang of equally hunky, leather-wearing vampires. Patric is given a female love interest, played by Jami Gertz, but the film is far more interested in the calls from the alluring bad-boy bloodsuckers for him to ‘join us’. I didn’t consciously recognise the movie’s now bleedingly obvious queerness at the time; I just knew that I loved it and watched it so often I could recite much of its dialogue.

The Lost Boys also features Dianne Wiest, one of my many actress obsessions, those who played the strong female characters who I always wanted the story to be about, but who were generally relegated to love interests or subplots. Sure, Harrison Ford was incredibly handsome, but why couldn’t Raiders of the Lost Ark have been about Marion Ravenwood, the fierce, brawl-starting, drinking competition–winning Karen Allen character? She was a woman running a dive bar in Nepal, for goodness sake. And how could anyone want to see more Roger Moore in A View to a Kill with Grace Jones in the same film? I was never much interested in religious education at my Catholic school, because my holy trinity already comprised Bette Midler in The Rose, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Amen. I prayed at their church long before I had the slightest clue of their ordained central place in gay culture – before I had the slightest clue that there even was such a thing as gay culture.

I don’t know when exactly that snippets of information accumulated into certainty that there were people called ‘gay’ who loved and desired people of their own gender and existed outside the shower room of Turkish prisons. By the time that uncertain flicker burst into a radiant glow, I was determined to remain forever in the dark. In my school playground, being gay was the worst thing you could possibly be. I didn’t really buy into that idea – I had no problem with other people being gay – but I was a well-behaved kid who rarely pushed even the tiniest boundary of what was considered good behaviour. How, then, could I ever step into a world that seemed to only lurk on the fringes? Surely I, like Davis, would shake my head, no? Surely I was still Herbie looking for my Giselle, a Tramp in search of his Lady, a charming prince looking for a girl in a coma protected by dwarves?

You can raise an entire nation of children on nothing but heterosexual imagery, and the result will still be a bunch of queer kids in there among that hetero-majority. We’ve given censorship a red-hot go as a means of preventing homosexuality and yet, even with all that straight kissing up there on the screen, there are still boys who want to kiss other boys, girls who want to kiss other girls, along with all those kids who suspect that the label ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ doesn’t quite fit them like it seemingly does everyone else. By keeping these children in the dark we don’t protect them – we just keep them in the dark.

When, somewhat belatedly in my early twenties, I finally admitted what my feelings for Dirty Dancing–era Patrick Swayze had clearly been indicating for some time, my first step as a newly minted gay man was to search out every queer movie I could find. This was the era of New Queer Cinema and I saw Paris Is Burning, Swoon and The Living End at arthouses like the Academy Twin in Paddington and the Valhalla in Glebe. At the legendary Videodrama video store on Oxford Street, I found Maurice, Making Love and the ridiculously beautiful Joe Dallesandro in Flesh and Trash. I devoured Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet and searched out Hays Era classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rope and Rebel Without a Cause.

I still hungered for a great gay rom-com or a queer action hero. And so, I remade movies in my mind, retelling the story to myself as I watched, imagining the happy queer romance or heroic victory that the story could have included in a different world.

That’s part of the work that so many of us have to do. We make leaps, restructure and remake so that the world onscreen begins to look a little more like our lives, or the lives we imagine for ourselves. At its worst, such work makes us feel excluded, pushed to the margins or out of the picture completely. But it can be powerful. It expands the possibilities of our world, revealing the porousness of otherwise impermeable-seeming borders. Watching The Matrix, I was never Keanu Reeves but always Carrie-Anne Moss, revelling in this incredible, powerful, leather-clad female hero; sometimes making her the centre of the story and giving her a female love interest; sometimes making her character male. Gender becomes malleable, a performance, something we can shift around and play with; sexuality becomes fluid.

In recent years the onscreen possibilities for queer childhoods have expanded. In 2012, ParaNorman was reportedly the first animated children’s film to include an openly gay character. Not the main character, sure, but visible in the text nonetheless. Teen-friendly soap operas from Glee to Riverdale feature queer characters with active romantic and sexual lives. Ruby Rose is set to star as Batwoman, the first openly queer television superhero (the character has openly been a lesbian since she first appeared in the comic books, in 2006). And the recent Love, Simon is the gay romantic comedy I would have killed for as a teen. I’ll admit to shedding a few tears at the end of that totally charming movie, partly out of happiness for Simon, and partly out of sadness for the queer kids like me for whom it came too late.

Despite all this positive change in representation, the moral panic around the Safe Schools program in 2016 demonstrated a continued unease in Australia over the very idea that some kids might be queer. Queerness is something that children must be protected from, so the story goes, not something they should be allowed to accept as a potential part of themselves. This notion infuriates me. It turns childhood into a period of limbo that queer people have to get through before the world will finally, grudgingly admit we aren’t going to be straight or cisgender.

As a kid, I was invisible to myself because of adults who would rather I was worried and confused than gay. A world of adults more troubled by the idea of Bert and Ernie coming out than by the number of queer kids who take their own lives. Movies have brought me much happiness over the years, but I still wonder about the damage done by all of that silence. I think about the anxious kid I used to be and feel enormous anger on his behalf. If I could go back and give him anything it would be a pile of movies in which the teen hunk has a crush on another boy, where the action hero saves her girlfriend, where two muppets are in love and their gender is nobody’s business. He could stare into that screen and be made visible. Not opaque or shadowy or uncertain, but vibrantly, joyously and unmistakably queer.