During the last two years, in every major city in America, there has come a flood of exclusively “homophile” movies which run at gay theaters, like the Eros in Manhattan, before audiences composed primarily of aging voyeurs beating the meat in the back rows. The appearance of homosexual films on the market (I think it would be accurate to claim that homosexual films constitute a separate genre in themselves, creating their own conceits, dramatic rituals, etc.) coincides with the growth of organized homosexual lobbies, such as the Gay Liberation Front, which emphasize political street action rather than court appeals to guarantee homosexuals equal treatment for their community. Thus we have a remarkable situation in which homosexuals abandon the closet to battle police over the closing of the Stonewall Saloon, picket city hall against civil service discrimination, storm a police station outraged because the pigs have injured a youth in another bar raid. We are witness to the creation of exclusively homosexual hippie communes in San Francisco, and the publishing of the names of policemen who work as undercover agents in the entrapment of homosexuals. All of which I find gutsy and commendable, particularly the latter since it has about it an appropriate irony. It has been the threat of disclosure which police have used to hassle homosexuals for generations. What the hell does some poor cop say to his wife when she learns that he has volunteered to wile away the night shift in the men’s room of Grand Central? I was only taking orders? The pigs have it coming—let’s admit it, the Vice Squad is, along with the Red Squad, the most indecent and dishonest and assuredly corrupt of police gangs.
The homosexual film industry (for that is what it has become—an industry with contract players, producers, an embryonic star system, a burgeoning network of gay theaters) is beginning to seek critical legitimacy, to self-consciously consider its product as art and as authentic socio-psychological documentation when, from the limited samples I have seen, homosexual films on the whole are little better than sexploitation vehicles, homemade movies, boy-boy beaver flicks. It is not promising and, as far as the socio-sexual pretense goes, it is literally softcore. Simulation. The boys don’t get it up.
Los Angeles, as befits a city without a recognizable culture, is the production base for Pat Rocco’s film company, Bizarre. Rocco is the Cecil B. DeMille of lavender Hollywood (the Ross Hunter is more to the point) and he has given the world such jewels as: The Sailor and the Leather Stud, Big Muscle, Fanny’s Hill, Groovy Guy, The Sailor Stud at Large, Yahoo, The Body, Strip-Strip, Sunny Boys, Big Bares, Magic in the Raw, Up, Up, and A-Wow! and Surprise Lover. Not bad, considering the fact that he has been grinding them out for only two years, has had no previous experience with the medium (unless being a dancer on the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show counts), and runs a mail-order beefcake basket boy-boy book business on the side.
While in Los Angeles, I attended the premiere of Pat Rocco’s latest epic, Mondo Rocco, at the Park-Miller Theater. The evening was interesting on several counts: it displayed members of the homosexual community in a public light—queens and Rocco-actors bounding awkwardly out of rented Cadillacs onto the red carpet under the marquee, mouthing incoherently into a microphone held by a small man looking uncomfortably like the checkout man at Food City, and nervously running his left hand over his hairpiece, as he and the film crew hired by Rocco recorded the event. It showed the queens finding heaven at least in going under the sky light to a real Hollywood premiere, as stars yet, tripping by a crowd of disbelieving locals, straight as hell, pressed behind the police ropes utterly spaced by seeing their local theater turned into a gay Grauman’s Chinese overnight. One note: an actor arrived in typical Hollywood evening dress—wide fishnet bellbottoms, a fluorescent blue evening jacket, pampered blond hair, and, underneath all that fishnet, nothing but a gold jock cup and bare ass.
Mondo Rocco is four hours long. It consists of a series of short films, two of which are romantic, trite boy-meets-gayboy stories (the same sensibility which, in a different age, produced what were called “ladies pictures”); a passingly interesting short about a youth in prison who is almost raped by an aged inmate (who resembles the model in the Poligrip commercials—”It really holds my dentures! I can eat apples now!”) but is saved in the nick of time by his hung and darkly handsome cellmate; a three-part female impersonator routine in which Judy Garland, Mae West, and Barbra Streisand are each in turn demolished; and finally, to give the whole sack of nuts some socially redeeming importance, we are treated to boring documentary sequences covering such earth-shaking events as a love-in in a park in Los Angeles, a gay power demonstration fed by Rev. Troy Perry, and a police raid on a bewildered male nude dancer in a sleazy suburban bar.
The four hours limp to a close with a little number called The Kiss. I was not ready for it. Picture this: two blond midwestern types, with a distinct imbecilic vacuity about the eyes, spy each other through Edenic foliage on the edge of a field of yellow grass. Their looks lock. Heavy breathing. Their hearts tremble. Pause. The plowboys move toward one another. They fall to their knees and in slow motion crawl naked through the long grass toward each other. Within touching distance, they resist temptation and instead of banging to it like normal human beings, they begin to run in everwidening circles around each other, staring idiotically at each other’s faces, running faster, their members bobbing absurdly like shuttlecocks on a string. Finally they embrace and kiss while the Longines Symphonette Strings quiver dramatically. Good God.
To end this quickly: before the premiere I spent time talking with Mr. Rocco; I believe, despite the amateurishness and falsely lyrical nature of the story lines, despite the incompetence of the actors, l believe that Pat Rocco is truly, yes, Virginia, truly, seriously attempting to create a legitimate homosexual cinema. He actually believes the line he rattles off about his pictures having a Message. It could only happen in California. Thank God, only there.