If we are to understand the role of the media in the lives of gay people, we must turn to the darkened caves and silver screens of the cinema. Like other minorities, gay people were mostly invisible on the screen, and thus the process of studying the relationship of gays and the media began with the archaeology of mainstream images. This enterprise was initiated by film critic Parker Tyler, whose 1972 Screening the Sexes was an early post-Stonewall view of movies with an openly gay eye. The serious study of homosexuality in the movies was largely stimulated by the work of Vito Russo, who combined an involvement in gay politics with a fascination for movies. Gathering material while working in the film library of the Museum of Modern Art, Russo developed an extensive survey of homosexual images (both explicit and implicit) in Hollywood film and took to the road with an illustrated lecture called “The Celluloid Closet”; this was also the title of the book version published in 1981 (a second edition in 1987 included an extensive updating, as well as analyses of television programs).1
Much early work of gay activist-scholars—and the term is appropriate, as no one unengaged by the gay movement was pursuing these matters publicly—focused on the delineation and analysis of the stereotypic portrayals of gay people in the media. In 1977, when the British Film Institute published Gays and Film, a thin volume edited by Richard Dyer, it had few companions on library shelves. Two of the three articles included (“Lesbians and Film: Some Thoughts,” by Caroline Sheldon, and “Stereotyping” by Dyer) focused on stereotypes. As Dyer put it, stereotyping was “relatively little explored in any systematic way and full of contradictions and confusions. Yet it remains an important area, for it is from representations of social groups that people get their ‘knowledge’ about those groups—and that goes for members of those groups themselves.” In the two decades since, the number of books and articles on gay people in/and the media has expanded to fill several feet of shelf space, but the issue of stereotyping remains a constant and conflicted concern.
One of the first films made at the Edison Studio in New Jersey in 1895 was a five-minute experimental film directed by William Dickson, that showed two men dancing together to the music of a waltz played on an Edison gramophone. It was called The Gay Brothers. While we don’t know what Dickson intended this light-hearted scene—or its title—to suggest, we do know that this brief curtain-raiser did not prove typical of the thousands of movies that have followed.
When the movies did approach homosexuality it was almost always within a narrow range of roles. When members of a minority begin to appear on movie and television screens, the roles they are permitted to play are generally limited to two categories: victim or villain. In the case of African Americans these two types can be seen, on the one hand, in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), in which black men are vicious rapists whose attacks on white women are foiled by the white male heroes of the KKK, and on the other, in the caricatured lazy and foolish servants portrayed by Stepin Fetchit and Butterfly McQueen. By representing a threat to be defeated or by serving as a fun-house mirror that highlights the hero’s normal image, both villains and victims upheld the importance of staying on the straight and narrow path.
Characters representing racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans, Asian Americans, and through the 1950s even “white ethnics” such as Italian, Polish, and Jewish Americans—may have represented a threat to the values but not the identity of “mainstream” Americans (although the frequency with which stories of “passing” by light-skinned African Americans appeared in movies suggests that threats to white identity were a concern in this case). Lesbian and gay characters posed a more serious problem for mainstream values and identities. Unlike racial minorities, sexual minorities are not easily identifiable by skin color, facial features, or accents, and they are not segregated in ethnic neighborhoods. As with the “Red Menace” of the 1940s and 1950s, in which Americans were warned that Communists were, metaphorically, hiding under their beds, in the case of lesbians and gays, Americans were afraid of who might literally be in their beds.
American movies have been preoccupied with lesbian and gay people, but for decades this took the form of hidden and coded representations. In the case of women the disguise was often just that: cross-dressing that allowed the audience to enjoy the discomfort of the characters because they were “in on the joke.” Women dressed as men were allowed to evoke ambiguous responses from their male costars, as long as the roles were “straightened out” by the final clinch. But while the mystery lasted it sent mixed messages to audiences, and we can assume that lesbians and gay men sitting in darkened theaters in 1936 paid particular attention when Cary Grant told Katharine Hepburn, whose character in Sylvia Scarlett was disguised as a young man, “There’s something that gives me a queer feeling every time I look at you.”
In 1932, when Hollywood was preparing to film the biography of Queen Christina of Sweden, starring Greta Garbo, a New York journalist noted the evidence that Christina’s one persistent love was for a Swedish countess and wondered, “Will Garbo play such a Christina?” Of course, Garbo did no such thing, but the role she played in Queen Christina (1933) gave lesbian audiences a lot to contemplate. Christina prefers to wear men’s clothing (which Garbo herself was known to do), scorns the male suitors she is urged to accept, and then reveals real affection by greeting Countess Ebba with a passionate kiss; and when the Chancellor groans, “But your majesty, you cannot die an old maid!” she replies, “I have no intention to, Chancellor, I shall die a bachelor!” Although Christina does ultimately fall in love with a man (who falls in love with her while she is disguised as a boy!), the film may speak most truly when Christina muses, “It is possible to feel nostalgia for a place one has never seen.”
As film scholar Andrea Weiss has noted, “Rumor and gossip constitute the unrecorded history of the gay subculture.” In the 1930s sexually ambiguous stars like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo—both since revealed to have been bisexual—created an image of the androgynous woman that was taken to heart by lesbians who followed their screen roles and gossiped about their private lives. Gay men had few such opportunities, however, as there was no male equivalent to these female stars. For men any appearance of androgyny, far from being alluring and mysterious, was a threat that had to be countered through ridicule. The early history of the movies, and especially the period after the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930s, was full of what Vito Russo described as “frivolous asexual sissies” who provided comic relief playing sidekicks, servants, and scapegoats. What was almost completely forbidden was any character who was explicitly lesbian or gay.
There is a Hollywood legend that producer Sam Goldwyn was told that Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness wouldn’t work as a movie because it was the story of a lesbian, to which Goldwyn was supposed to have replied, “So what? We’ll make her an American.” That exchange may never have occurred, but in 1936 Goldwyn produced a film version of Lillian Hellman’s Broadway play, The Children’s Hour, in which lesbianism was erased completely. In the film These Three, Hellman’s play about two women schoolteachers whose lives are destroyed when a vicious child falsely accuses them of being lovers was transformed by Goldwyn and director William Wyler into a more suitably American tale in which the liar accuses one teacher of an affair with the other teacher’s fiancé.
Throughout the period of the Code lesbian and gay characters were often implied in movies, but always as threatening or pathetic or ridiculous figures. Female characters with sinister lesbian overtones appeared in prison and mental hospital plots (Caged, The Snake Pit), and as predatory and unscrupulous (Young Man with a Horn, All About Eve). Male roles with gay overtones depicted sad young men (Tea and Sympathy, Rebel Without a Cause) and vicious degenerates (Suddenly Last Summer).
By the end of the 1950s the Motion Picture Production Code was weakening, and one of those working to undermine its authority was director Otto Preminger. In 1953 Preminger made one of the first challenges to the authority of the Code by producing The Moon Is Blue, a comedy that not only failed to condemn adultery (although none occurred in the movie) but actually used the forbidden word “virgin”! In 1961 Preminger filmed the best-selling novel Advise and Consent, a story of political intrigue in Washington, D.C., in which a senator commits suicide when an early homosexual episode is brought to light. The Motion Picture Association of America was forced to accept that times had changed and issued a policy on October 3, 1961, stating that, “In keeping with the culture, the mores and the values of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care, discretion and restraint.” Discretion and restraint meant, as the MPAA cautioned, that “sexual aberration could be suggested but not actually spelled out.” It also still meant that lesbian and gay people would be depicted, in Vito Russo’s words, as “pathological, predatory and dangerous; villains and fools, but never heroes.”
Director William Wyler took advantage of the new rules to make a second film version of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1962), and this time he retained the original version of the lie told by a little girl. Wyler was quoted as saying that, “The lie has to have such a devastating effect that to be credible it must be appalling.” Apparently he also meant it had to be unspeakable: although it is clear that the child is alleging that the teachers are carrying on a lesbian relationship, the word lesbian is never uttered. What is more, no one in the film suggests in any way that were it true it would not be a tragedy. The climax of the film occurs when one of the teachers realizes that she is, in fact, attracted to the other woman. “I’m guilty!” she cries. “I’ve ruined your life, and I’ve ruined my own. I feel so damn sick and dirty I just can’t stand it anymore.” The consequence of this realization of her lesbianism is that she promptly commits suicide, only one of many lesbian and gay characters of the period who take their lives when faced with the “awful truth” about their sexuality.
The 1960s ushered in a period of cultural change and growing openness to aspects of sexuality previously denied and repressed in American society. As has been noted, the ferment of the 1960s fertilized the ground in which the seeds of gay liberation sprouted. But in Hollywood the climate remained chilly for lesbian and gay characters. The relaxed Code did permit writers and directors to include homosexuals in their films, but only as long as they were unhappy.
The 1961 British film Victim told a story that was influenced by the landmark Wolfenden Report of 1957, a parliamentary document that argued for the legalization of homosexual conduct between consenting adults (this recommendation was adopted by the British government in 1967). The Wolfenden Report had used as an argument the fact that their criminal status made gay men unusually susceptible to blackmail, and Victim tells the story of a blackmail victim who fights back.2 When the producers wanted to show the film in the United States, they were denied approval by the Code office because of the “candid and clinical discussion of homosexuality and its overtly expressed plea for social acceptance of the homosexual.” The British producers distributed the film without a seal, but Hollywood studios were more cautious. They avoided the risk of being denied a seal by steering clear of depictions of sympathetic or happy homosexuals.3 Lesbian and gay villains showed up with relentless frequency, only to be defeated by the heterosexual heroes. James Bond, perhaps the quintessential symbol of straight male virility in this period, was responsible for disposing of several lesbian and gay male killers, among them Lotte Lenya’s evil Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (1963), and a gay couple in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), who are shown hand-in-hand before Bond burns them to a crisp. But homosexuals didn’t have to be killers in order to end up badly, and they could administer their own punishments.
The storyline pioneered by The Children’s Hour was repeated with variations by other writers and directors, except that the exposure of a character’s homosexuality did not depend on the perceptiveness of a vicious child. In The Sergeant (1968), Rod Steiger plays a sexually repressed homosexual who doesn’t understand why he is obsessed with a handsome young soldier. When his secret eventually explodes in his face—Steiger kisses the enlisted man and is rebuffed—he runs off into the woods and shoots himself. These two films share the core plot components of fictional depictions of queers in that period (and which haven’t entirely disappeared): The story is set in a homosocial environment (a girl’s school, an army base). The homosexual character is love with a straight person, and neither the gays nor the straights realize what’s going on; the gay characters are in the closet, even to themselves. Self-realization leads to rejection by the heterosexual loved one, and despair and disaster for the queer character.4 In Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Marlon Brando is another sexually repressed military man, this time a colonel who follows a young private around, spying on him at night. When he realizes that the private is attracted to his wife, not to him, the colonel shoots the young man.
As the decade of the sixties moved toward the explosion of the Stonewall riots, two movies presented unusually explicit portraits of lesbian and gay life. However depressing the lives they portrayed, these films did expand the angle of vision to encompass lesbian or gay relationships. The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970) were presented by the producers and accepted by the critics as unflinching glimpses of gay life: “tacky, tawdry, repellent and true,” in the words of Life critic Richard Schickel. Sister George is the name of a character in a British television soap opera, and she is “killed off” in the program because the real-life actress who plays her is too blatantly lesbian for the producers. George’s aggressively butch personality—and her heavy drinking—lead to her complete ruin. She loses both her job and her lover through the efforts of a smoothly seductive BBC executive who personifies the sinister lesbian. The message of the film was not merely hostile to lesbians, it was a demonstration of the dangers of being open about it. As director Robert Aldrich put it, “She doesn’t fit into the machine.”
Although the film was condemned by lesbian and gay critics as yet another story of a doomed homosexual, Sister George has also been seen in a more positive light as an unapologetic feisty lesbian who is undone as much by her own honesty as by her abrasiveness.5 The real message of the film was that being out of the closet was dangerous to your health. This message was repeated eightfold in The Boys in the Band.
Based on a successful Off-Broadway play by gay writer Mart Crowley, Boys in the Band was translated to the screen with very few changes and with the original New York cast. The decision to use the stage actors in the movie version was not, strictly speaking, a tribute to their theatrical skills. Few film actors were willing to be seen in gay roles—a situation that remained little changed over the next thirty years. This is not to say that stage actors were unconcerned about the images they portrayed. When the play opened in New York in 1968, Cliff Gorman (the actor playing Emory, “the definitive screaming queen”) made sure the public knew he was only acting. As a New York Times reporter explained in an interview entitled, “You Don’t Have to Be One to Play One,” it’s “not exactly the kind of part you’d imagine for a nice (married) Jewish boy.” But then, “Cliff really needed the money,” and was so broke he had even taken to “hocking his wife’s silver candelabra.” Elsewhere in the article we were shown Cliff popping open a cold beer, listening to country music (the only music “that really moves him”), and generally swaggering around the living room. In the accompanying photograph he clutched his “incredibly beautiful” wife.
The story of Boys focuses on a collection of assorted gay types who gather at a birthday party and proceed to savage—and comfort—each other in a drunken orgy combining self-hate and solidarity. After a behind-the-credits sequence that introduces the characters with a series of stereotype-evoking vignettes, the film, like the play, takes place entirely within the confines of the host’s apartment, presumably conveying the claustrophobic isolation of the “gay world.” Critics hailed it as “a landslide of truths,” accepting both the stereotypical gay characters and their acute self-hatred. For gay people the film prompted a more complex set of responses. While stereotypical, the characters also rang true, and they weren’t all unhappy or dysfunctional. The film allowed its gay characters to display a biting wit and a determination to survive despite the odds. As Vito Russo put it, Boys provided “the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form. It supplied concrete and personalized examples of the negative effects of what homosexuals learn about themselves from the distortions of the media.”
When the central character surveys the wreckage of his apartment at the end of the party and asks, “Who was it who said, ‘You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse?,’” he summarizes an entire genre of movies: out of thirty-two films between 1961 and 1976 with major lesbian or gay characters, thirteen feature gays who commit suicide and eighteen whose homosexual character are murdered. To gay protests about the film of Boys in the Band, director William Friedkin responded, “This film is not about homosexuality, it’s about human problems. I hope there are happy homosexuals. They just don’t happen to be in my film.” Nor have they been in many other major American films.
While not yet presenting happy homosexuals, two films of the same period did mark an advance in the treatment of gay themes. Both Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday were made by gay, but still-closeted, British director John Schlesinger. Midnight Cowboy is a queer-inflected “buddy movie” about Joe Buck, cowboy from the sticks turned inept male hustler in New York (played by Jon Voight), and Ratso Rizzo, scuzzy crippled petty crook (played by Dustin Hoffman), who somehow end up offering each other friendship and comfort. The film’s approach to homosexuality was ambivalent at best, typified by Joe Buck’s hostile relations with gay male clients, and Ratso’s dismissal of Joe’s cowboy getup as “faggy.” Yet there was something about the film’s acknowledgment of gay sexuality—however creepy—and its depiction of a male friendship that went beyond the jauntiness of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that represented progress for Hollywood. This conclusion was shared by the industry, apparently, as Midnight Cowboy won the Best Picture Oscar for 1969.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday, released in 1971, was both more significant in its gay content and less successful at the box office. Even now, thirty years after it was made, Sunday, Bloody Sunday stands out as an unusually mature and sensitive film dealing with homosexuality. The story concerns two middle-aged Londoners: a physician, played by Peter Finch, and a career woman, played by Glenda Jackson, who are involved—and in love—with the same young man, played by Murray Head. Ultimately the young man leaves them both, going off to New York to pursue his artistic career, and they each, in their own way, philosophically accept their loneliness.6 Peter Finch’s doctor is far from a stereotype; if anything, he’s so mature, articulate, and sensitive that he appears far too good for the callow young man he’s in love with. The film is a landmark in another way: the relationship between Finch and Head is revealed to the audience through a totally unexpected and quite passionate kiss. According to Vito Russo, when they were about to shoot the kiss the cameraman asked, “Is this really necessary?” Finch was often asked by reporters how he felt doing the scene, to which he would reply, “I closed my eyes and thought of England.” The kiss never failed to evoke gasps, giggles, and even jeers and walk-outs from audiences. To this day, an on-screen gay male kiss can be counted on to produce the same reactions, especially from young male audiences.7
In 1979 William Friedkin shot another film in Greenwich Village with a gay plot, but this time it was based on a mystery novel written by a heterosexual New York Times editor, Gerald Walker. The novel, Cruising, used a plot device that has since become something of a cliché: someone is killing gay men and a police detective is assigned to go undercover to locate the killer in the seamy underworld of New York’s S&M bars.8 Cruising took the audience on a safari into the jungles of darkest Manhattan, as undercover cop Al Pacino tracks the psycho-killer who stabs gay men while fucking them. We learn that the killer is in some crazy way trying to placate his dead father by killing gay men—presumably thus killing the homosexuality that his father rejected in him. As Scott Tucker wrote in the Body Politic, “Friedkin does not have the killer dress up in the clothes of his long dead mother; he may have refrained only because Hitchcock’s Psycho beat his psycho to it.”
The killer isn’t the only one with emotional problems: the undercover cop becomes psychologically caught up in the leather/S&M world he’d been sent to explore, possibly even to the point of becoming a killer himself. In the film’s climactic scene Pacino and the killer cruise one another in Central Park, entering a dark tunnel (duh!) where they drop their pants and engage in some astounding dialogue: “How big are you?” “Party size.” “Do me first.” “Hips or lips?” Both men reach for their knives, and Pacino gets the killer first. In the final scenes, Pacino’s gay next door neighbor—the only relatively happy gay man in the film—is killed and it appears that Pacino is the killer. The film ends with Pacino gazing in the mirror, leaving us to wonder whether he has been pulled into the psychotic world of gay sexuality. Homosexuality, it is strongly implied, is contagious as well as lethal.
Friedkin told the press that he didn’t know who the real final murderer was, and that he wasn’t necessarily homosexual, but the implication of the film is unmistakable. It was more likely that Friedkin was responding to the protests that engulfed Greenwich Village during the shooting of the film. Someone leaked the script to Village Voice columnist and gay activist Arthur Bell, who proceeded to raise hell in his column about what “promised to be the most oppressive, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen,” urging his readers “to give Friedkin and his production crew a terrible time if you spot them in your neighborhood.” More than six hundred people gathered at a town meeting in response to Bell’s columns, and activists subsequently asked the city to withdraw the film’s shooting permit. City officials refused to intervene, citing free speech and asserting that “anything that brings this city seven million dollars is good.” When the filming continued, the crew was met with hundreds of demonstrators blowing whistles, which carried far and loud enough to interfere with the shooting. A confrontation between demonstrators and police erupted when mounted police charged, and a group of protestors got close enough to engage in a tug-of-war over a camera cable before they were beaten back by police clubs.
The protests slowed the filming and added to its cost, but the show went on. In response to the protests Friedkin left the identity of the final killer unclear, thus making the film’s conclusion more ambiguous than the script (and the novel) had suggested. Further, despite having told Vito Russo in an interview that “these scenes could be run as documentary footage,” he inserted a disclaimer at the start: “This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” Of course, as Russo pointed out, this disclaimer is an admission of guilt: “What director would make such a statement if he truly believed that his film would not be taken to be representative of the whole?”
When Cruising opened in 1980 it was met by more protests, but this time the protestors were joined by the critics, who uniformly savaged the film. The film was largely ignored by audiences, despite full-page ads condemning the protestors as censors and urging citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights by seeing the film to judge it for themselves (nothing was said, however, about refunding their money if they disliked it). The protests over Cruising were paralleled by the gay community’s response to another 1980 film, Windows, in which a psychotic lesbian (Elizabeth Ashley), in love with a straight woman (Talia Shire), hires a straight man to attack Shire so that she will reject men and turn to Ashley. As critic David Denby put it, “Windows exists only in the perverted fantasies of men who hate lesbians so much they will concoct any idiocy in order to slander them.” Responding to such films, gay media activist Ron Gold emphasized, “We are not asking for censorship. We are asking Hollywood to use the same system of self-censorship they apply to other minorities. … We always find ourselves in the position of having to play civil libertarian to a bunch of bigots who want their constitutional right to express their hatred of us.”
The leaflets protesting the filming of Cruising warned that the film “will encourage more violence against homosexuals. In the current climate of backlash against the gay rights movement this film is a genocidal act.” The rhetoric might have seemed excessive at the time, but it was hauntingly recalled in November 1980 when the son of a Harlem minister drove up to the Ramrod bar, site of the filming of Cruising, and began firing a submachine gun. Ronald Crumpley, a 38-year-old former transit cop, married with two children, stole his father’s car, drove to Virginia to buy guns, and set off, as he told the police, to kill gays: “They ruin everything.” When it was over, six men were wounded and two gay men were dead.
In the summer of 1966 anthropologist John Adair and filmmaker-turned-communications scholar Sol Worth embarked on an innovative research endeavor along with a group of Navajo men and women in Pine Springs, Arizona. Decades before, pioneering anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski had written that “the final goal, of which an ethnographer should never lose sight … is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” Adair and Worth applied this principle by giving 16mm movie cameras to six Navajo people and encouraging them to make movies that would reflect their point of view, their vision of the world. The Navajo Film Themselves Project was recognized as a milestone in developing collaborative approaches to filmmaking.
Ten years later two of John Adair’s children, Peter Adair and his sister Nancy, both gay, set out on another sort of collaborative film project: to record the stories of other gay and lesbian people, to let them speak for themselves. Their project became the Mariposa Film Group, comprising three lesbians and three gay men (one of them African American), assisted by several others, including Peter and Nancy’s mother Casey, who worked on a book version of their project. Members of the group traveled the country, videotaping lesbians and gay men who were willing to tell their stories, and showing portions of the film-in-progress to obtain feedback and raise money, mostly from lesbian and gay audiences. From about 150 initial interviews the filmmakers eventually chose thirteen men and thirteen women to appear in the 16mm film. Months of editing reduced hundreds of hours of film to 135 minutes, giving each narrator approximately eight minutes of screen time (portions not included in the film were added to the book). The resulting film, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1978), went on to successful runs and rave reviews in cities around the country. An edited one-hour version eventually played on PBS in October that same year.
The final group of narrators included a 77-year-old lesbian poet (who said, “If there was ever any problem with my being a lesbian, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn’t know anyone else like me”); a New Mexico Chicana couple; a San Francisco gender-fuck activist; a rural lesbian who talked about being committed to a state hospital as a teenager; a San Francisco gay lawyer who told of being forcibly committed by his in-laws and subjected to shock therapy; an African American college student contending with the pressures of being black and gay in an Ivy League school and the distance his schooling was placing between him and his family; two divorced lesbians living with their kids in a suburb; and a young man who said that when he first fell in love with a man, “it meant I was a real person. I wasn’t just a machine.”
There were criticisms of the film for its focus on the personal stories of the narrators rather than on political issues of oppression and the gay liberation movement. But, in fact, woven through the accounts of individual lives were glimpses of lesbian and gay history not known to most viewers, gay or straight. The film’s narrators included Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay, who talked about the early days of the movement.9 George Menden-hall, a working-class San Francisco activist, was moved to tears—and so were many in the audience—when he talked about the Black Cat bar and its famous entertainer José Sarria, whose campaign for city supervisor in 1961 helped stimulate gay political organizing in San Francisco fifteen years before Harvey Milk.10 For most viewers Pat Bond’s stories of the comradeship she found while serving in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II were a revelation, and her account of the repression and purges that followed the war was emotionally wrenching. San Francisco lesbian-feminist Sally Gearhart articulated the conflicts she experienced between feminism and gay liberation, “having to choose between … whether I was going to put my energy with my straight sisters, who in some cases were being very oppressive to lesbians, or with my gay brothers. … And it meant that a lot of times I was splitting myself up in ways that I didn’t want to.”
In story after story the personal and political intertwined, illuminating the narrators’ lives and evoking laughter and tears in the spirit of the consciousness-raising groups that had emerged during the early 1970s. The echoing commonality of the experiences recounted by the otherwise diverse cast of narrators—resonating with the lives of many viewers—served, in Richard Dyer’s words, to “establish lesbian/gay identity and demonstrate the social dimension of personal experience.” In its implicit insistence on the underlying shared experiences of lesbian and gay people, Word Is Out reflected the emergence of a political stance centered on what came to be called identity politics. The spirit of identity politics had been the implicit guiding principle in 1968 when Frank Kameny argued that “the ONLY people in all the world” who were trying to “instill in the homosexual community a sense of worth of the individual homosexual” were “the pitifully small number of us in the homophile movement.” In their influential Black Feminist Statement, published in 1977, the Boston-based Combahee River Collective proclaimed that “the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. … This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”
The core narrative of lesbian and gay identity at that time—and it hasn’t entirely changed—was that of coming out, to oneself, to other gay people, to family, friends, and the world at large. The theory and strategy of the post-Stonewall movement was centered on the ideology of public self-disclosure as the key to psychological health for individual gay people and to liberation from oppression for the gay community. Gay liberationists, in John D’Emilio’s words, “recast coming out as a profoundly political act that could offer enormous personal benefits to an individual. The open avowal of one’s sexual identity, whether at work, at school, at home, or before television cameras, symbolized the shedding of the self-hatred that gay men and women internalized, and consequently it promised an immediate improvement in one’s life. To come out of the ‘closet’ quintessentially expressed the fusion of the personal and the political that the radicalism of the late 1960s exalted.” Further, D’Emilio argued, “Visible lesbians and gay men also served as magnets that drew others in. … Once out of the closet, they could not easily fade back in. Coming out provided gay liberation with an army of permanent enlistees.”11
Coming out narratives connected individual experiences to shared experiences and thus solidified a sense of community and identity. Word Is Out was only the most widely distributed and ambitious example of the coming out documentary in which lesbian and gay people come out to the world by telling their stories. And, as Thomas Waugh noted, this telling was itself a political act: “The consent to declare oneself before the camera still has for every potential subject of a lesbian/gay documentary all the dimensions of an irreversible, life-changing political commitment.”
Beyond the individual stories that gay people told each other in consciousness-raising groups and the world in documentary films, the 1970s also witnessed the rediscovery of stories from the past. In 1972 GAA member Jonathan Ned Katz created a theatrical docudrama, Coming Out!, that energized audiences. The Gay Academic Union was founded in 1973, and the following year John Lauritsen and David Thorstad’s The Early Homosexual Rights Movement was published and the Journal of Homosexuality was launched. In 1976 Jonathan Katz followed his documentary play with a more influential project, the 700-page collection Gay American History. Following Katz’s inspiring model, grassroots lesbian and gay history (and herstory) projects sprang up around the country—in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, New York, San Francisco—and the results of their research began to appear in newspapers and journals created by the lesbian and gay liberation movement.12 Jeffrey Weeks’s Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present was published in 1977 in Great Britain, introducing what came to be termed the social constructionist view of sexuality.13 Gay history’s first best-seller, John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, appeared in 1980, reinforcing the “essentialist” position opposing the rising tide of social constructionism.
Toronto’s The Body Politic played a crucial role in the emergence of lesbian and gay studies, both by publishing the work of scholars who were pioneering what was then a far from respectable field, and by convening two key international conferences, in 1982 and 1985. These were crucial to the coalescing of lesbian and gay studies as an international “invisible college” of scholars in and out of the academy (two other influential conferences were held in Amsterdam, in 1983 and 1987). By the early 1980s the research of these community-based historians was feeding into the mainstream through the work of documentary filmmakers screened on public television. Historical documentaries such as Silent Pioneers (Lucy Winer, 1984), Before Stonewall (Greta Schiller, 1985), and especially the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen, 1984), were seen by audiences who would never have sought, found, or risked reading the Body Politic or Gay Community News.
La Cage aux Folles was a surprise hit in 1978, far surpassing the typical run for a foreign-language film (it ran in one New York upper East Side theater for months). The film’s success was even more surprising, however, when its subject matter is taken into account: this is a story about Renato and Albin, a middle-aged gay couple, the son they raised (the product of a one-night stand by one partner), and the son’s rabidly right-wing prospective in-laws. The gay couple own a nightclub in which Albin is the headliner of a drag show. The plot of the film revolves around the son’s efforts to hide the reality of his parents’ lives from his prospective in-laws, at first by asking Albin to disappear. Albin refuses to cooperate and, after a failed attempt at learning to appear more masculine, greets the son’s fiancée’s parents in drag, as his “mother.” Much farcical confusion ensues, with an appropriately satisfying comeuppance for the right-wing politico father of the fiancée.
The film’s popularity with straight audiences can be explained in part by the perennial appeal of men in dresses, whether gay or straight, and the complete absence of any threat to what Christopher Isherwood called the heterosexual dictatorship. Renato and Albin are depicted as a loving, long-lasting couple, but we never see them kiss, nor express any other real physical affection; and they certainly never question “normal” masculinity as the appropriate standard of dress and behavior. Even more notable, however, is the film’s refusal to condemn the son’s abominable behavior: In order to avoid revealing the truth to his fiancée’s parents, he is willing to repudiate the person who raised him as “her” child.14 And, of course, he gets his way. By making the fiancée’s parents rabid right-wingers, the film creates a sort of see-saw, with the gay couple on one side and the prospective in-laws on the other, balanced by the heterosexual son as the “normal” figure in the middle with whom the straight audience can identify, thus even further insulating him from blame for his inexcusable behavior.
The success of La Cage aux Folles led to two sequels, in 1980 and 1985, and it inspired a Tony-award-winning Broadway musical by gay composer Jerry Herman and gay playwright Arthur Laurents. The story was remade by Hollywood in the 1990s as The Birdcage, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as the gay couple. The impact of La Cage’s success encouraged Hollywood producers to undertake gay-themed projects, especially ones in which effeminate queens turn out to be just as courageous as straights: Zorro, the Gay Blade (1981), inoffensive twaddle—the title tells you everything you need to know (once you also know George Hamilton plays Zorro); Victor/Victoria (1982), a female/male-impersonation farce in which James Garner can safely fall in love with Julie Andrews because (we know) he knows she’s really a she; and the aforementioned Partners (1982), written by Francis Veber, who wrote La Cage, about a straight and a gay cop who go undercover as a gay couple to catch a murderer (the gay cop, played by John Hurt, is a mega-sissy, but he saves his macho partner’s life in the end, while getting shot himself).15
Following a familiar pattern, the director of Partners was quoted assuring potential audiences that, “I don’t see Partners as a gay film. It doesn’t deal with the issue of gayness. It is a movie in which two people learn from each other.” Somewhat less predictably, the coproducer of another film made at the same time made the same claim for his film: “We’re not anxious to have Making Love defined as a gay movie.” Allan Adler was talking about the story of a doctor who comes out of the closet and leaves his wife for another man: “We hope that it will be seen as a love story. It’s not a slice of gay life.”
The producer may have thought he was helping his film’s box office chances by recycling this familiar rhetorical dodge, but he was fooling no one. Quite the opposite, as the making of Making Love had been much heralded in Hollywood and the media as the “breakthrough” gay film. Its birth depended on the convergence of many fortuitous circumstances. The project was engineered by a successful agent, Arnold Steifel of International Creative Management. Written by a Steifel client, openly gay screenwriter Barry Sandler (based on a story idea by gay writer Scott Berg—whose brother was the president of ICM), the project was taken up by Daniel Melnick, a powerful (straight) producer with progressive views, and sold to Sherry Lansing, who had recently taken over as the first female head of production at a major studio. The director was Arthur Hiller, a solid industry performer with a record of successful but certainly not risk-taking movies. With a strong production team in place, the challenge they faced was casting the male leads. After being turned down by Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, and William Hurt, among others, they succeeded in hiring two less established—but “certifiably heterosexual”—actors: Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean. Melnick reported that he persuaded them by asking, “If you played Adolf Hitler, would anyone think you were the most evil man of the 20th century? If you played the Boston Strangler, would anyone think you were a mass murderer?”
Making Love tells the story of a successful, handsome doctor (Ontkean) who must confess to his beautiful and loving wife (Kate Jackson) that he is in love with a man: a successful, handsome writer (Hamlin). When Hamlin makes it clear that he isn’t the monogamous type, Ontkean finds a rich, handsome white architect and settles down with him in a Manhattan penthouse. The film’s ending shows Ontkean visiting Jackson, settled with her new husband and her young son. Everyone is happy except the stubbornly promiscuous Hamlin, but we’re not sure, as he’s dropped out of the story by this point (if the film expresses any judgments about sexuality, it’s to condemn the Hamlin character for his unrepentant nonmonogamy).
When the film opened, the studio ran two different ad campaigns: the ad for the straight-audience ad showed Ontkean and Hamlin together with Kate Jackson, who plays Ontkean’s wife, and it’s Ontkean and Jackson who are touching. In the gay-press ad Ontkean has his arm around a bare-chested Hamlin. For the film, the creators assiduously avoided melodrama: Ontkean’s coming out is relatively lacking in anguish, and his breakup and divorce seem fairly painless. Jackson’s character is a successful career woman who is not economically damaged by the divorce, and Ontkean’s professional standing as a physician is unthreatened.16 What they had succeeded in creating, however, was a boring film that was too straight for gay audiences and too gay for straight audiences. It was a critical and commercial flop.
Despite the film’s considerable drawbacks, it did contain one scene that left an impact on audiences: Hamlin and Ontkean kissing, undressing each other and, as the film’s title promised, making love (although this last part wasn’t exactly visible on screen). The scene set off the familiar jeers and catcalls from straight audiences, but for gay (male) audiences it was the first time that two handsome male movie stars had appeared in a love scene. The film also has a happy ending—however Hollywoodish and white-washed. In this way the film might have fulfilled screenwriter Sandler’s hope that it would reach a “17-year-old kid in Oklahoma City who’s really confused about his sexuality,” and that seeing a character choose a homosexual life and ultimately find happiness might make him think, “If it’s okay for him, it’s okay for me.”
At the end of the 1960s, on the cusp of Stonewall, Boys in the Band and Sister George had offered straight audiences a matched pair of “backstage” glimpses of gay and lesbian life that were mixtures of misery and solidarity. In 1982, as Hollywood began cautiously opening a window onto gay and lesbian lives, Making Love had a lesbian counterpart in Personal Best, although in this case the writer-director, Robert Towne, was, in his words, boringly heterosexual. Towne’s pitch to the media—and, likely, to the Warner Brothers executives—stressed the size of the homosexual audience: “We’re talking about 35 or 40 million people … and if they hear a film is really interesting, you’re going to get them out to see that film—not just a small percentage, but at least half of them.” Towne also touted the edginess of the topic (“It gives us a taboo that we badly need for the sake of drama”) in a way that differed fundamentally from the goody-goody ambitions of Making Love. Yet if Making Love can be faulted for “normalizing” homosexuality into an all-male version of up-scale domesticity, Personal Best is another film about lesbianism as a temporary interruption in the flow of heterosexual life.
Personal Best tells the story of two women athletes, Chris (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory (Patrice Donnelly), who meet at the 1976 Olympic track trials, where they become friends and then lovers. They live together for several years, but their domineering (male) coach succeeds in turning them into competitors and they break up. Chris then begins an affair with a male swimmer. The film concludes at the 1980 track trials, where Chris deliberately sacrifices herself so that Tory can win a place on the 800-meter Olympic team—thus allowing feminine solidarity to triumph over the masculinist competitiveness represented by the coach (it doesn’t hurt that Chris independently wins a place on the team in another track event). Yet, solidarity aside, the film keeps the dramatic focus firmly fixed on Chris, safely ensconced in heterosexuality while Tory recedes into a supporting role.
The film did not present a challenge to heterosexual supremacy. Once again, we are shown a single lesbian who has unsuccessfully loved—and lost—a woman who ends up as heterosexual. In Towne’s words, “For some people, experimenting with homosexuality is a phase; for some people it is not a phase. In the film one girl [sic] discovers that her sexual preferences lie more in that direction; for the other girl [sic] that is not the case.” And unlike the male-male kissing scene that disturbed straight (male) audiences of Making Love, Personal Best was easy on straight male eyes. As both lesbian and straight critics noted, the story permitted the camera to linger on the bodies of women athletes, in action and at rest, and in various states of undress.
Yet, as had been the case with Sister George, there were pleasures to be had by lesbian viewers of Personal Best. As feminist critic Elizabeth Ellsworth noted, lesbian feminist reviewers expressed pleasure in watching the dominant media “get it wrong,” attempting but failing to colonize “real” lesbian space. Lesbian viewers also responded to Patrice Donnelly—in contrast to the official star, Mariel Hemingway. Lesbian reviewers noted the verisimilitude of Donnelly’s performance, her “expression of desire and strength in the face of male heterosexual dominance.” These reviewers, Ellsworth reports, celebrated the responses of lesbian audiences to these moments: “clapping, laughter, and feelings of validation in a context otherwise reserved for the reproduction of heterosexist romance.”17
During the late 1970s, as lesbian and gay filmmakers were able, with difficulty, to produce independent documentaries, there were stirrings of lesbian and gay fiction films as well, exhibited through mainstream (art) theaters and becoming accessible to a nationwide gay audience. Vito Russo described this budding genre as a homosexual cinema: “It neither concerns itself overtly with issues of gay politics nor does it present gay sexuality as society’s perennial dirty secret. The key to gay films … is that they do not view the existence of gay people as controversial.” Even more unusual, these films present gay characters as the central characters with whom audiences are invited to identify (in contrast, say, to the gay characters in Sister George or Boys in the Band, who are more specimens to be studied than characters to identify with).
Russo wrote in 1986, the year in which three of the most notable of these new films appeared: Desert Hearts and Parting Glances in the United States and My Beautiful Laundrette in Great Britain. All three did well with mainstream audiences, and they also evoked a powerful response among their primary audience, often becoming cult films. Desert Hearts is such a film. Made on a small budget raised in two and a half years of arduous grassroots efforts, and based on a novel by Canadian lesbian author Jane Rule, Desert Hearts achieved both crossover box office success and a cult following among lesbians.
“I’ve waited 25 years for this movie,” a 47-year-old secretary in San Francisco told lesbian journalist Jan Husten. “I’m sick of seeing only heterosexual love stories. Desert Hearts is a movie I can finally identify with. It’s like when I was little, we only had ‘white dolls’ to play with, as if all babies were white. Movie makers have done the same thing; they’ve generally ignored gays until the last few years. … I’ve seen it 22 times and am still not tired of it.” The screenplay writer, Natalie Cooper, commented, “It isn’t so much the content. It’s a matter of the identification with it and the way it’s been presented. I’m glad that it served—for anyone—no matter how small, something that could make people feel okay, instead of feeling peripheral or put down. Just to say, ‘Hey, I dig it and I love it; I do that, too.’ They can say, ‘This is our movie, this is our thing.’ It makes them feel, dare I say maybe, not proud but viable.”
Desert Hearts is a “coming out” story in which a married woman staying in Reno in order to obtain a divorce falls in love with a young woman, experiencing both the joy (and sensual pleasure) of self-realization and the pain of hostile societal reactions. Audiences are presented with three primary characters: a woman who discovers her lesbianism in a relation with a younger, self-assured lover, and the younger woman’s disapproving stepmother. Yet, for once, the heterosexual character’s perspective does not dominate. The younger lesbian woman speaks the film’s message when she says, “I don’t act that way to change the world, I act that way so that the world doesn’t change me.” In the end, possibly to the audience’s surprise, love wins out and the lovers go off together. As filmmaker Donna Deitch told Ms. magazine, “At the time I bought the rights to the book, there hadn’t been a film about a relationship between two women that hadn’t ended in suicide, like The Children’s Hour, or in a bisexual triangle. I wanted to make just a love story, like any other love story between a man and a woman, handled in a frank and real way.”
In contrast, Parting Glances is a film in which the homosexuality of the central characters is simply a fact, taken for granted by them, and others. Writer-director Bill Sherwood had moved to New York at eighteen, just months after the Stonewall riots, and he saw himself as among the first filmmakers of the post-Stonewall generation, for whom gayness is assumed. In Sherwood’s words, in this film, “Everyone’s doing fine without the straights. They’re completely on the periphery.” A Cincinnati Enquirer critic said of Parting Glances, “The day may come when movies like this are part of the mainstream of American film—a time when people are treated as people, no matter what their sexual preference.” But others faulted it for its concentration on gay characters. As Bill Sherwood put it, “Critics who were not sympathetic to Parting Glances would cite My Beautiful Laundrette, saying that it wasn’t a film completely about gay people but also about issues which they consider more real or even more worthy. You get the opinion that it isn’t entirely appropriate to have a film which is centered around gays.”
The critical bind that Sherwood was caught in is a familiar one for minority artists facing mainstream critics: they are held to a standard of “universalism” that seems suspiciously modeled on the concerns of the critics themselves. The pattern was set by reviewers critiquing gay playwrights and novelists. Heterosexual critics find fault with gay artists for not rising above their parochial concerns, that is, for addressing themselves to the concerns of their fellow gay people. In a 1980 letter to the New York Times Book Review, justifying his negative review of Edmund White’s States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, critic Paul Cowan asserted that “it’s crucial to communicate across tribal lines. Good literature has always done that—it has transformed a particular subject into something universal. Mr. White didn’t do that: in my opinion it’s one of the reasons he failed to write a good book.” Novelist David Leavitt was ground by the same ax, this time wielded by New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, when Leavitt published his first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, in 1986. Lehmann-Haupt seemed quite sympathetic to the novel and congratulated Leavitt for creating explicitly homosexual characters (though he did this by dragging in the tired, and discredited, claim that Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee “were forced by convention to disguise homosexuals as heterosexuals”), thus enabling the critic to “discern a resolution to the old debate over whether or not homosexual art is inherently limited.” In other words, parochial, not universal. And, no surprise, Leavitt didn’t quite pass the test, perhaps because he was “subtly biased in favor of [a homosexual character’s] outlook.” Better luck next time.
In contrast, when a gay writer is praised, artistic success will be defined as having achieved universalism. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, ever vigilant on the ramparts of literature, was more charitable toward Edmund White’s 1988 novel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, but no less focused on the main question. His review opened: “The subject is homosexuality in Edmund White’s new novel. … There are in the book explicit scenes of lovemaking. So the question is immediately posed: Is this a novel of parochial appeal, or can anyone, regardless of sexual preference, appreciate it?” Fortunately for White, he passed the test, if only barely, as “there is much in [the novel] that makes one uncomfortable, if only because it is so specific in its sexual appeal.”18
Time and again, when straight critics—and even some gay ones—wish to praise a queer writer they reach for the universalism button. In 1988 Newsweek recognized the growth in lesbian and gay publishing in a feature, “Out of the Closet Onto the Shelves.” In discussing the growing body of AIDS-related writing, the critic Walter Clemons praised Paul Monette with the ultimate accolade: “The category of gay literature no longer applies: we enter the universal arena of human loss.” Similarly, William Henry, writing in Time, commended Terence McNally’s play, The Lisbon Traviata, for depicting a doomed affair “with specific detail and authentic, universal pain.” Back at the New York Times, in 1993, Michiko Kakutani reviewed Dale Peck’s “astonishing first novel,” Martin and John, “an indelible portrait of gay life during the plague years,” but, she seemed relieved, “it also opens out to become a universal story about love and loss and the redemptive powers of fiction.”19
In 1993 playwright Tony Kushner astonished the theatrical world with the success of his epic, Angels in America, winning the Pulitzer and Tony awards and selling out theaters for this two-part, seven-hour “gay fantasia on national themes” (as Angels was subtitled). Critics were predictably quick to see Kushner’s work in a broader, dare we say, universal light. Writing in the Chicago Daily News under the appropriate headline, “‘Angels’ Reaches Beyond Gay Issues,” Richard Christiansen offered a representative sample: “Some of the reason for Kushner’s success can be attributed to the strength of his voice as a member of the increasingly vocal gay community of this country. Angels springs directly from a gay political, social and sexual culture, and it expresses that culture with pride, force and eloquence. … But Angels in America, which roams across heaven and earth in its fantasy, is considerably more than a well-written gay play. For the first time in years, an American playwright has succeeded in painting on a broad canvas, exploring ‘national themes’ on a grand scale. … Much of its story is necessarily bleak, dealing with death by AIDS, but the play is also an amazingly vibrant and joyous work, celebrating not only the gay spirit but the eternal resilience of a confused and besieged humanity.”
Perhaps good literature has always transformed a particular subject into something universal. But there is always a double standard in the application of the universalism criterion. And, needless to say, gay artists are not the first to have been put to the test. In an essay entitled “Colonialist Criticism,” the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe decried those Western critics who evaluate African literature on the basis of whether it overcomes parochialism and achieves universality: “It would never occur to them to doubt the universality of their own literature. In the nature of things, the work of a Western writer is automatically informed by universality. It is only others who must strive to achieve it.” And, Achebe continued, they achieve it by taking on the coloring of European culture, “as though universality were some distant bend in the road which you may take if you travel out far enough in the direction of Europe or America, if you put adequate distance between you and your home.”
In a particularly condescending example of the universalism ploy, critic Mary McCarthy wrote “A Memory of James Baldwin” in which she congratulated herself for appreciating Baldwin as her “first black literary intellectual.” What she means by this is explained as follows: “Baldwin had read everything. Nor was his reading colored by his color—this was an unusual trait.” Whether Baldwin thought McCarthy’s readings were colored by her color we’re not told. A similarly blatant example of racist universalism was reported by Michael Denneny, who “watched an almost classic liberal, Bill Moyers, on his television show ask [Pulitzer prize-winning African American playwright] August Wilson, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of writing about the black experience?’” As Denneny says, this is a question of breathtaking stupidity that makes one wonder if Moyers would ask John Updike he ever tires of writing about the white experience. But, of course, we know the answer: Moyers probably equates “the white experience” with life itself, that is, it’s universal.