CHAPTER 2 How We Are Seen,
How We See Ourselves

Imagery and imagination are two variations on the same theme. They both come from the same root word (the Latin imaginari); imagery takes us outside of ourselves to look at the world around us; imagination takes us into ourselves to find and create our own internal visions. Without imagery, it is hard to have imagination. And without imagination, no one can create imagery. All of us, gay and straight, look both to the world around us and inside to discover who we are, and who we can become. But this discovery does not happen in a vacuum. In attempting to define ourselves for ourselves, we are strongly influenced by what we see in the media, on film, in news-papers and magazines, on television, and what we read or hear about ourselves or about people whom we perceive to be like us.

art DID YOU KNOW…

The New York Times did not start using the term “gay” in place of “homosexual” as an adjective until July 15, 1987, after negotiations with GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation

For many years, the images of gay men and lesbians remained obscure. In novels, one had to “read between the lines” to find any gay presence at all; happy endings were not allowed for gay characters. The same was true for film and television: Most overtly gay characters (the early images were mostly of men) were either portrayed as evil or played for laughs. And while gay people have inherited this legacy of invisibility and negativism, there is more to the story. Over the past twenty-five years, as gay men and lesbians have become more active in creating our own imagery, there has been an enormous change in what we all see when we pick up a magazine or turn on the television.

The dual focus of this chapter is critical to fully understand what images of gay and lesbian people are available to us. It is important to look at how gay people have been and are currently portrayed in popular American culture; it is equally essential that we become aware of the myriad ways that we have created our own images for all to see. As gay and lesbian people, how we are seen and how we see ourselves—from television to theater to radio to the written word—profoundly affects every aspect of who we are.

PROJECTED IMAGES:
HOMOSEXUALITY AND FILM

Whether in large-scale Hollywood pictures or small independent movies, the visual imagery projected onto the big screen tells society a lot about what we think of our-selves and one another. The images we see in cinema are powerful; the larger-than-life portrayals are set to musical scores and carefully edited in order to create the most profound visual impact. Most of us have entire catalogues of memories based just on the images we have taken home from the movie theater.

art DID YOU KNOW…

After bowing out of an onscreen gay kiss with Anthony Michael Hall in the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, actor/rapper Will Smith found himself in hot water with the gay community. In an otherwise well-conceived movie, Smith insisted on changing the camera angle so that, shot from behind his head, it was supposedly impossible to tell whether or not the two actually kissed. Instead, it was glaringly obvious that they hadn’t. In a later Advocate interview, Smith said, “I would definitely like to have that moment back. Halfway is not the way to go. You either do it or you don’t. YOU don’t adjust the camera.… I wasn’t mature enough to handle the homosexuality.”

But for lesbians and gay men, these images often leave much to be desired. When we aren’t simply excluded, we’re frequently portrayed in derogatory or superficial ways. Since the beginning of film, Hollywood has always had some representations of homosexuals and homosexuality. But the images have mostly been created by straight (or closeted) directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors. Just as Hollywood portrayals of women and people of color illuminate more about society’s attitudes toward these marginalized people than they reflect reality, images of gay men and lesbians have for the most part been conjured out of homophobic or, at best, uninformed imaginations, having little to do with who we actually are.

Of course, there have also been overtly gay and lesbian film-makers around for just over two decades who have been producing more accurate representations from within our communities. Their work, often seen only in festivals or on video, continues to be a source of inspiration, information, and strength for lesbians and gay men around the world.

More recently, as gay and lesbian filmmakers and videomakers have been able to produce their own movies in increasing numbers, new forms of film have been born. Whether or not one calls it “queer cinema,” the new avant-garde has become the fascination of not only gay but also straight audiences in festivals and art movie houses across the nation.

AIDS, too, has been a major subject of gay male filmmaking over the past decade, and, in the last few years, has been the subject of several mainstream movies.

For better or worse, we have been seen by others and have seen ourselves on film. As we continue to gain visibility and access to the means of cinematic production, those images will expand to portray the diversity of gay and lesbian communities. Hopefully, those projected representations will give lesbians and gay men everywhere an ever-increasing source of empowerment and pride.

A Brief History of Lesbians and Gay Men in Mainstream Film

Until recently, dismissal and disinformation was Hollywood’s modus operandi regarding homosexuality. Lesbian and gay characters were dismissed literally—the Production Code, the major studios’ self-censorship mechanism, banned “sex perversion or any inference of it” from the 1930s into the 1960s—but also figuratively in the countless derisive portraits of sissy men, predatory lesbians, and psychopaths of both persuasions. The disinformation included the perpetuation of myths, long after they had been proven false, that lesbians and gays were mentally unbalanced, prone to criminality, incapable of moral behavior, and a general threat to society.

Lesbian and gay references in American films of the silent and early-sound eras occurred almost uniformly in comic circumstances, the laughs often hinging on reversals of gender and/or sex roles. The gags typically alluded to homosexuality without actually depicting homosexuals. Examples include the “sissy boy” title character of Algid the Miner (1912), whose adventures out vest “make a man out of him” a case of mistaken homosexual identity in Charlie Chaplin’s Behind the Screen (1916): Fatty Arbuckle’s flirtation with another man while dressed in a woman’s bathing suit in Fatty at Coney Island (1917): Laurel and Hardy’s extended clothes-changing routine in Liberty (1929): and lesbian-tinged role reversal in A Florida Enchantment (1914).

In the Arbuckle film, Fatty’s flouting of gender and sexual norms eventually provokes violence: in this respect, the movies did mirror real life. What makes such gags work, claimed the comic’s mentor, Keystone Studios producer Mack Sennett, sounding a lot like Sigmund Freud, is the “exposure of repressed desire” —in Fatty’s case homosexuality. Three-quarters of a century later, movies still trade on the taboo. Eddie Murphy gets a cheap laugh in The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) when he momentarily thinks a U.S. senator is “going homo” on him. Eddie’s response is the same as in Coney Island and numerous other pictures: “’Cause if you are, I’m gonna have to whup you.”

A Florida Enchantment’s plot revolves around a special seed that turns women into men and vice versa. A woman who takes it becomes “mannish” and begins flirting with women, kissing them on the lips and dancing with them. The woman’s behavior discombobulates everyone; Florida hints that one person’s subversion of sex or gender roles leads to social chaos. Any claim Florida might make to being the “first” lesbian film is qualified: Its heroine’s escapades turn out to be a “most horrible dream,” reducing female homosexuality to a gag, same as with the men.

In the United States during the early Hollywood Production Code era, only wisps of lesbian sentiment—tux-wearing Marlene Dietrich’s provocative kiss of a female bar patron in Morocco (1930), a fleeting reference to lesbianism in Blood Money (1933)—made it to the screen. More characteristic was the impulse toward deletion.Maedchen in Uniform (1931), from Germany, depicted the love between a young schoolgirl and her teacher. Maedchen made a direct connection between sexual and political repression just as the Nazis were coming to power. But when the drama played in New York, state censors removed lines of dialogue that made explicit Maedchen’s lesbian subplot. Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina (1933) seeks men, not women as the real-life figure reputedly did. In These Three (1936), the first film version of The Children’s Hour, what in Lillian Hellman’s play was an accusation of lesbianism against two women evolved on the screen into a charge that one coveted the fiancé of the other. It is perhaps just as well that the treacherous Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) is a lesbian only by implication in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

Gay male references were equally “coded” in the 1940s. Director John Huston slipped three homosexuals—played by Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook. Jr., and Sydney Greenstreet—past code censors in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but slid it so shrewdly that even most gays don’t pick up on the last two. The hints are stronger in Desert Fury (1947), which features two gay gangsters on the lam. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). inspired by the I, eopold-Loeb murder case of the 1920s, tiptoes around Code restrictions to allude to its leads’ homosexuality. The gay connection was made slightly more clear in Compulsion (1959) and quite specific in Swoon (1992). also about the same case.

Faced with a declining box office in the wake of television, producers in the 1950s began to demand a relaxation of censorship to allow for more “adult” material. Since the studios were essentially censoring themselves. they, like Dorothy with her ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, had always had the power to get what they wanted. They simply dimlrr’t know how (or didn’t dare) to use it.

The Production Code was revised in the early 1960s to allow depiction of “sex aberration” if treated with “care, discretion, and restraint.” Unfortunately, little restraint was shown toward homosexuals: In films such as Advise and Consent, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Children’s Hour (all 1962), they committed suicide, were murdered, or went to jail.

After the Code’s demise in the late 1960s, the first pictures under the “alphabet” rating system, still in use today, tended to repeat old stereotypes. A pathologically spiteful lesbian couple is torn asunder by a third, conniving lesbian in The Killing of Sister George (1968). Lesbian vampires started popping up with increasing and more titillating frequency. Repressed homosexuals commit suicide and murder, respectively, in The Sergeant and The Detective (both 1968). Bitchy, self-loathing queens populate The Boys in the Band (1970) and Some of My Rest Friends Are … (1971). “Homo Lesbo Themes at Peak: Deviate Theme Now Box Office,” screamed a Variety headline in 1969, a telling indicator of the industry’s level of sensitivity toward gays.

Although censorship had slackened, producers found little financial incentive to buck audience expectations. Mainstream religion, psychology, and folklore had for years decreed gays perverse; the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 announcement that homosexuality was no longer a mental disorder did not immediately override a century of negative propaganda. Having found that audiences had no objection to sick and twisted gays, producers served them up in dozens of 1970s and 1980s flicks. More sensitive portraits were apparently not worth the monetary risk. Even into the 1990s, research found that a large portion of the American audience responded negatively to “positive” gay representation—and any overt sexual expression, even kissing.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a number of conflicting trends. Cruising, Windows, and American Gigolo (all 1980) presented lesbians and gays as perverted and/ or criminal. The creators of Cruising and Gigolo maintained that their films weren’t saying that all homosexuals were a threat. While this may have been true, it begged the question of the cumulative effects of such portraits. High-profile community protests of Cruising may have led to more benign projects, including Making Love, Personal Best, and Victor/Victoria (all 1982), but the boom in sunnier mainstream portraits many lesbian and gay critics predicted never panned out. Gratuitous fag jokes and downright slurs were far more common throughout the decade. On the other hand, the number of inderwndent and art-house features—among them Lianna (1983), Desert Hearts (1985). My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), and Parting Glances (1986)—that attempted more complex representations steadily increased.

Though most observers agreed that Hollywood continued to malign gays while simultaneously deleting more “positive” references—lesbian angles were downplayed or excised in Switch, Fried Green Tomatoes, and LA Story (all 1991)—how to deal with the problem was another matter. Many lesbians and gays debated the value of large-scale protests against The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Basic Instinct (1992). Silence featured a killer with what one critic called “many gay signifiers.” and three bisexual women and a lesbian are implicated in murder in Basic Instinct. Some accused the protesters of generating enure interest in hateful portrayals: media strategists felt that although this might he true, going after big hits garnered more publicity for the notion that the malicious imagery was unfair.

It may only be coincidental that Tri-Star, which distributed Instinct, also financed the acclaimed AIDS drama Philadelphia (1993), by the same man (Jonathan Demme) who directed The Silence of the Lambs. What is worth noting is that the concept for Philadelphia had been kicking around Hollywood for several years but the “climate” had never quite been right for its production. Perhaps the protests did contribute to the change in atmosphere.

The girl is out there, Max (Guinevere Turner, left) finds love with Ely (V. S. Brodie, right) in Rose Troche’s 1994 smash lesbian hit, Go Fish. (Courtesy Samuel Goldwyn)

As the cinema embarks on its second century, there is reason for optimism. The success of Philadelphia and The Crying Game (1992) may have persuaded major studios that under the right circumstances large-scale profits can be made on pictures with major gay themes or plots. While the creators of Threesome (1994), Boys on the Side (1995), and Higher Learning (1995) may have “played it safe” with their lesbian or gay characters, each was clearly well intentioned. On the independent scene, works that previously might have played only the gay film festival circuit began turning up at such prestigious showcases as the Sundance (Utah), New York, and Venice festivals. The “crossover” success of Longtime Companion (1990), Paris Is Burning (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Go Fish (1994), and other films convinced independent distributors that the right projects could garner modest profits.

Even if the commercial cinema does become more consistently congenial toward lesbians and gays, the need for community-based works that reflect without compromise the full range of our lives and sexual expression will always remain. Hopefully, though, the gap between what the mainstream says about us and what we say and believe about ourselves will continue to close.

The Gay Psychokiller Hall of Fame

John Dall and Farley Granger kill a guy—just for the fun of it—who’s about to get married. They smoke a cigarette afterward.

Marlon Brando can’t deal with being gay. He murders the object of his desire when he discovers the man loves Brando’s wife.

Rod Steiger and George Segal are both mama’s boys. Segal finally works through it, but Steiger, who never cuts the apron strings, kills six middle-aged women.

A playwright and his gay lover knock off the playwrights high-strung wife to cash in on the inheritance, then kill each other.

A repressed homosexual commits multiple murders, often after someone calls him queer.

A “family man” accidentally calls and gets stalked by an employee of a phone-sex line in this gay fatal Attraction.

Was Jame Gumb gay, transsexual, or neither? He minced, had a fey voice, collected Nazi paraphernalia, had a male lover for ten years, thought he was a woman, and had a poodle named Precious.

The Screen’s Nastiest Lesbian or Bisexual Women

Judith Anderson torments Joan Fontaine and tries to convince her to commit suicide.

Giovanna Galletti is Ingrid, the conniving Nazi lesbian who preys on the cravings of weak-willed. Resistance-era Italian women for furs and baubles.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jo, the predatory madam who won’t let Capucine go straight.

Hateful, sadistic Shelley Winters (in one of her three lesbian roles) has Lee Grant (in one of her two such roles) under her thumb.

Carol Kane and Lee Grant have an incestuous relationship. When her sister wants out, Kane kills Grant’s boyfriend and later Grant herself.

Elizabeth Ashley pays a cabdriver to rape Talia Shire so Talia will (1) hate men and (2) need Ashley to comfort her.

Four lesbian or bisexual women have murder in their pasts and present in this controversial thriller.

Kelly Lynch pays stud-for-hire William Baldwin to seduce and then dump her girlfriend so that she’ll (1) hate men and (2) need Lynch to comfort her.

People Who Have Played Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual Roles

Jane Alexander (A Question of Love); F. Murray Abraham (The Ritz); Kevin Bacon (JFK); Antonio Banderas (Law of Desire; Philadelphia); Alan Bates (Butley; We Think the World of You): Tom Berenger (Looking for Mr. Goodbar); Dirk Bogarde (Victim; Death in Venice); Steve Buscemi (Parting Glances; Miller’s Crossing); Michael Caine (Deathtrap); George Carlin (The Prince of Tides); Cher (Silkwood); Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show); Bruce Davison (Longtime Companion); Daniel Day-Lewis, (My Beautiful Laundrette); Catherine Deneuve (The Hunger): Peter Pinch (Sunday Bloody Sunda): Farley Granger (Rope): Lee Grant (The Balcony; The Mafu Cage): Tom Hanks (Philadelphia):

Mariel Hemingway (Personal Best): Barbara Hershey (In the Glitter Palace): John Hurt (The Naked Civil Servant; Partners: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues): William Hurt (Kiss of the Spider Woman): Jeremy Irons (Brideshead Revisited): Tommy Lee Jones (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; JFK): Carol Kane (The Mafu Cage); Alex Karras (Victor/Victoria): Mitchell Lichtenstein (Streamers: The Wedding Banquet): Shirley MacLaine (The Children’s Hour); Gary Oldman (Prick U P your Ears; We Think the World of You): Robert Preston (Victor/Victoria): John Ratzenberger (The Ritz); Christopher Reeve (Deathtrap): Susan Sarandson (The Hunger); Diana Scanrwid (In the Glitter Palace; Silkwood): Helen Shaver (Desert Hearts): Rod Steiger (The Sergeant: No Way to Treat a Lady): Elizabeth Taylor (X, Y, &Zee): Meshach Taylor (Mannequin): Meryl Streep) (Manhattan): Uma Thurman (Henry and June; Even Cowgirls Get the Blues): Michael Warren (Norman, Is That You?): Robert Webber (10): Shelley Winters (Mambo; The Balcony; Cleopatra Jones): Michael York (Something for Everyone: Cabaret): Susannah York (The Killing of Sister George; X, y,& Zee).

And I’d like to Thank…

Oscar Awards have been given to more than thirty-five openly lesbian, gay, and bisexual recipients and/or gay-themed films in the Academy’s sixty-seven-year history:

1927–28

1932–33

1934

1940

1948

1949

1950

1953

1958

1959

1960

Best Costume Design: Edith Head and Edward Stevenson, The Facts of Life

1961

1963

1964

1965

1966

1969

1981

1984

1985

1987

1989

1990

1991

Best Song: Howard Ashman, Beauty and the Beast Best Documentanv Feature: Deborah Chasnoff, director, Deadly Deception

1994

Vito Russo, Movie Star

Vito Russo, author of the groundbreaking book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Monies, died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of fortyfour. His life and work have inspired two generations of lesbians and gay men to observe, question, and work to improve the images of us generated by media. He co-founded the media activist group Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and was an active member of ACT UP. His legacy also includes creating a foundation for many college-level courses in gay film in America and abroad.

Russo’s appreciation for the role film representations of lesbians and gay men could play in gay liberation began in the early 1970s while he was active in the Gay Activists Alliance. He would show camp classics to raise money for the GAA, inviting those in attendance to shout out queer comments. One of Vito’s favorite moments was during a screening of Night of the Living Dead, when a lesbian in the back of the audience shouted out “Save me a breast!” Those early screenings turned into lectures on homosexuality in film, which led to his seminal text on the subject, The Celluloid Closet. A documentary based on the book is scheduled to come out in 1995.

Vito Russo stands in front of the Castro Theater in San Francisco prior to a 1981 sell-out show of his The Celluloid Closet film and lecture on homosexuality in the movies (Rink Foto)

Vito Russo is remembered by friends for his love of Judy Garland, his sense of camp, his honesty, ambition, and his ability to understand that both media representation and individual action are entirely political.

Important Figures in Lesbian/Gay Cinema

A short list of notable contributors to cinema. Obviously, this list is hardly exhaustive. There are many other lesbians and gay men involved in film production who deserve credit; some are mentioned at the end of the biographies.

• Kenneth Anger. At just seventeen, Anger shot an erotic sailor-fantasy called Fireworks (1947). His vivid imagery contrasted markedly with censored Hollywood product. A major film artist who influenced George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and others, Anger’s output has been minimal but pivotal.

• George Cukor. Though publicly in the closet his entire career, this “A-list” director, as all Hollywood knew, was gay as a blade. Clark Gable reportedly had him fired from Gone With the Wind for this reason. Cukor’s many hit films include Dinner at Eight, The Women, The Philadelphia Story, and the 1954 A Star Is Born. Interesting tidbit: Cukor directed Two-Faced Woman. Greta Garbo’s last film. He died in 1976.

• Donna Deitch. She took seven years to scrape together the cash to make Desert Hearts (1985). It was worth the effort: The film just may be the most beloved lesbian film yet released. Deitch later directed the Oprah Winfrey TV-miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (1989), which featured two prominent lesbian characters.

• Robert Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman. These longtime companions collaborated on the Academy Award-winning AIDS documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989). Epstein had previously earned an Oscar for The Times of Harney Milk (1984). Their latest work is a film version of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, a history of gay people in film.

• Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The prolific “bad boy” of New German Cinema presented complex and difficult lesbian/gay/bi portraits. His legacy includes The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), and an adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querellc (1982). He died in 1982.

• Barbara Hammer. Dyketactics, Multiple Orgasm, and Doublestrength, among the experimentalist’s important 1970s works, unabashedly highlighted lesbian sensuality and sexuality in direct rebuttal to freakish main-stream depictions. Her first feature, Nitrate Kisses, released in 1993, examined censorship, erotic imagery, and lesbian/gay history.

• Pratibha Parmar. London-based Parmar transcends parochialism with works that also explore issues of race (Krush), disability (Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun), and women’s rights (Warrior Marks, made with writer Alice Walker). A moving early work, Flesh and Paper, depicts the life of lesbian poet Suniti Namjoshi.

• Marlon Riggs. Tongues Untied (1989), this actist-activist’s signature work, was an emphatic evocation of the beauty, conflict, and poetry of African American gay experience. Though it empowered many, Tongues ran afoul of PBS censors and members of Congress, and even became a cause C l bre during the 1992 Republican primary. Riggs’s other works include Color Adjustment, about blacks on TV, and No Regret, about 111V-positive African Americans. He died in 1994.

• Christine Vachon. A director of some shorts, Vachon’s major contribution to community cinema is as a producer. She’s been connected with a number of “New Queer Cinema” projects, including Poison and Swoon, and she helped shepherd the 1994 lesbian mini-hit Go Fish. Most recently, she is working on a film adaptation of Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall.

• Andy Warhol. Chiefly known as a visual artist and celebrity, Warhol’s importance as a filmmaker cannot be overestimated. His form-oriented experiments called Hollywood conventions into question even as they borrowed from the same. Warhol’s sixties films—My Hustler, Blow Job, Haircut (No. 1), and Bike Boy—are some of the queerest images ever committed to celluloid.

Marlon Riggs, filmmaker, is known best for Tongues Untied, which examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and love. Riggs died from AIDS-related causes in 1994. (Courtesy Frameline)

Other past and present lesbian/gay/bisexual film figures of note: Pedro Almodovar, Dorothy Arzner, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Bressan, Jr., James Broughton, Terence Davies, Dick Fontaine, Marcus Hu, Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin, George Kushar, Craig Lucas, Alla Nazimova, Ron Nyswaner, Ulrike Ottinger, Jan Oxenberg, Rosa Von Praunheim, Tony Richardson, Barry Sandler, Greta Schiller, John Schlesinger, Bill Sherwood, Monica Treut, John Waters, and James Whale.

Lesbian and Gay Documentaries

Documentaries have been an important part of gay and lesbian culture for over two decades. Both in film festivals and on video, documentaries provide tangible, accessible voices that represent a diverse variety of aspects of gay and lesbian life. This list covers some of the most enduring films.

Absolutely Positive (1989)

American Fabulous (1992)

Army of Lovers, or Revolt of the Perverts (1978)

Before Stonewall (1985)

A Bigger Splash (1974)

The Celluloid Closet (1995)

Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (1992)

Chicks in White Satin (1993)

Coming Out Under Fire (1994)

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1994)

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)

Daddy and the Muscle Academy (1992)

Damned in the USA (1992)

Desire (1989)

Erotikus: History of the Gay Movie (1975)

Forbidden Love (1993)

Gay U.S.A. (1977)

Home Movie (1971)

Improper Conduct (1984)

Last Call at Maud’s (1992)

Life Is a Cucumber (1990)

Love Meetings (1964)

Nitrate Kisses (1992)

One Nation Under God (1993)

Out: Stories of Gay and Lesbian Youth (1994)

Paris Is Burning (1991)

Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80 (1984)

Portrait of Jason (1967)

Positive (1990)

The Queen (1968)

Resident Alien (1991)

Sex Is…(1993)

Silence = Death (1990)

Silent Pioneers (1985)

Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993)

Strip Jack Naked (Nighthawks II) (1991)

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

Voices from the Front (1992)

Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die (1985)

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977)

AIDS and the Cinema

AIDS Dramas

Philadelphia (1993) was Hollywood’s belated acknowledgment of the AIDS epidemic, eight years after network television’s An Early Frost. Previous independent features include Buddies (1985), Parting Glances (1986), Longtime Companion (1990), and The Living End (1992). In addition, Home Box Office produced the feature-length film adaptation of Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On in 1993.

AIDS Documentaries

Hundreds of films and tapes have explored AIDS and its medical, social, and personal repercussions. Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1990) won an Academy Award. Absolutely Positive (1989), No Regrets (1992), and Living Proof (1993) dealt with living with HIV. Dying for Love (1987) and (In)Visible Women chronicled the lives of women with AIDS. Ojos Que No Ven (1987) was one of the first AIDS-prevention videos developed for the Hispanic community. Too Little, Too Late (1987), which focused on families of people with AIDS, was the basis for the made-for-TV drama Our Sons (1991).

Film Notes and Quotable Quotes

“You are not a lesbian. This is a temporary thing.”—Sylvia Miles to daughter Andrea Feldman in the tongue-in-cheek Heat (1972)

“We met at an automat off Times Square.… He paid for my ham and eggs” was one of several clues that the two gangsters in Desert Fury (1947) were gay.

“You’re spoiling it for the rest of us,” a discreet 1930s London gay bar owner tells the flamboyant Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1975). Replies Crisp, “You mean the way a consumptive with a cough spoils the fun of tuberculosis?”

“Every time a heterosexual actor puts on a dress, they give him a fucking Academy Award. I don’t understand it. We spend our lives playing heterosexuals and nobody ever gives us any credit for the incredible job we’ve done.”—Harvey Fierstein

“What made me think I could do this? I think I was out of my mind.”—Desert Hearts (1985) director Donna Deitch on why she embarked on what turned out to be a seven-year project

Head Hollywood Code censor Joseph Breen found revisions to the A Streetcar Named Desire script that made more clear why Blanche’s husband killed himself “completely unacceptable by reason of the fact that they inescapably suggest that the Grey boy is a sex pervert.”

“The gay community simply has to accept the possibility that gay or bisexual people can be engaged in criminal activity.”—Basic Instinct scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas

Mart Crowley conceived of The Boys in the Band as a cautionary tale about gay men’s need not to “hate ourselves, so very, very much.” He may have dramatized his characters’ self-loathing all too well: Many gays so hate the film they perhaps miss his message. The Boys in the Band director William Friedkin went on to make the controversial Cruising.

“This is a not a gay story set in the straight world. This is a gay story set in the gay world, where the heterosexuals come in and sort of torture us!”—Harvey Fierstein on the difference between Torch Song Trilogy (1988) and earlier mainstream gay portrayals.

“The fear of homosexuality is found in movies more often than homosexuality itself.”—Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet

“Hollywood cinema, especially, needs to repress lesbianism in order to give free rein to its endless variations on heterosexuality.”—Andrea Weiss in Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film

Robert Aldrich offered to remove lesbian love scenes from The Killing of Sister George (1968) to avoid an X rating. He was told the film would get an X anyway, because of its subject, lesbianism.

New Lesbian Cinema: More than a Casual Gesture

Lesbianism in the popular 1991 film Fried Green Tomatoes (based on a most admirable novel) was “completely cloaked.” In my review of the movie, I also wrote, “For those in the know, Mary Stuart Masterson may he the cutest baby butch to hit the screen since Patricia Charbonneau in Desert Hearts.”

In other words, the cumulative history of faux-lesbian representation in the movies has allowed us to stake our Sapphic claims where we can find them. Although lesbian film images are beginning to move out of the shadows, progress remains halting, due to both a lack of funding for independents and the intransigence of a studio system bent on recycling proven formula. Lesbian crowd-pleasers like Personal Best (1982) and Desert Hearts (1985) bubble up only occasionally, anomalies to the dictates of Hollywood’s hegemonic machinery. But in the wake of Claire of the Moon, a 1992 romance that turned a surprisingly pretty profit, funding may be more readily available for enterprising lesbian filmmakers, and major studios may have caught the whiff of a trend.

Just as the so-called New Queer Cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s showcased a wave of fresh work from gay male filmmakers (e.g., Tom Kalin, Christopher Munch, Todd Haynes), and a movement of vibrant African American cinema emerged in the aftermath of Spike Lee’s success (from directors John Singleton, Julie Dash, Allen and Albert Hughes, and others), lesbians, too, on the cusp of the millennium, are developing a canon of our own. Not only are dyke filmmakers more willing than ever to push the lavender envelope, they’re making aesthetic choices—sometimes born of economic necessity—that constitute an oppositional approach to the standard conventions of narrative moviemaking (and pay homage to pioneering lesbian predecessors like Barbara Hammer, Michelle Parkerson, and Ulrike Ottinger). Sure, mainstream movies will continue to offer up the occasional gesture, casual and otherwise, but the boldest lesbian work is coming from within our own ranks. Directors as diverse as Jennie Livingston, Cheryl Dunye, Jan Oxenherg, Midi Onodera, and Maria Maggenti have feature-length movies in the pipeline. And rumor has it that Rubyfruit Jungle, after many false starts, may finally make it to the silver screen.

Two films from 1994, Go Fish and Fresh Kill, are prime examples of the new wave of out-and-proud lesbian cinema, in which the kisses are passionate, the palette multicultural, and the politics knit seamlessly into the narrative. Rose Troche’s Go Fish is a gentle romantic girl-meets-girl saga by and about the under-thirty set. Combining urban smarts with angsty intimacy, the movie spotlights a swath of contemporary youth culture familiar to anyone who lives (or sight-sees) in queer enclaves. The story centers on the courtship of aspiring writer Max (Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote the screenplay with Troche) and quiet. skittish Ely (V. S. Brodie). After a rocky introduction masterminded by Max’s roommate. Max and Ely engage in regular date-type activities like dinner and a movie before progressing to more imaginative foreplay … nail clipping. If the climactic sex scene is more realty montage than cathartic cum shot, at least the day-after glimpse of a jubilant Ely strutting down the boulevard telegraphs a kind of lesbian-specific chutzpah rarely captured on celluloid.

Likewise, Fresh Kill, from director Shu Lea Cheang, weaves a bold, tender love story into a broader tale about environmental crises, global media monopolies, and living on the borderlands of race and gender. Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) are an interracial couple with a young daughter who become entangled in a surreal caper involving a kidnapping, contaminated sushi, and Staten Island’s infamous landfill. More formally experimental than Go Fish, Fresh Kill jerks from stylized, cyberpunk set pieces to jingly Manhattan street scenes to graphic lesbian sex of considerable urgency and heat. As in Go Fish, nobody has to come out—all the key players are true-blue lesbians from the get-go. Both films break new ground, both in despectacularizing lesbian lives and in their renegade retro/pomo posturing. At once irreverent and respectful, Go Fish and Fresh Kill are more than just date movies; they are harbingers of terrific things to come in the arena of rebel filmmaking, lesbian and otherwise.

Queer Cinema

Who says what defines “new queer cinema”? Perhaps more important, who cares? For many of the filmmakers and videomakers who are being classified as “new queer,” the label sends them scrambling to try to set themselves apart from the rest of the genre by explaining how their work diverges from what people consider “queer.” So what makes a movie queer?

Queer cinema, with its influences in the works of Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, and Kenneth Anger (not to mention seventies television and MTV), began as a phenomenon in 1992, after producers Marcus Hu and Christine Vachon introduced The Living End and Swoon to the festival circuit. While arguably “queer” films were made prior to then, it was an article by B. Ruby Rich in the September 1992 issue of Sight and Sound that coined the phrase “New Queer Cinema,” and by doing so invented a new genre.

A TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE HANDFUL OF QUEER MOVIES

The Hours and Times (1991), Christopher Munch

Poison (1991), Todd Haynes

R.S.V.P. (1991), Laurie Lynd

Dry Kisses Only (1992), Kaucylia Brooke and Jane Cottis

Grapefruit (1992), Cecilia Dougherty

Krus and Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun (1992), Pratibha Parmar

L Is for the Way You Look (1992), Jean Carlomusto

The Living End (1992), Gregg Araki

The Meeting of Two Queens (1992), Cecilia Barriga

She Don’t Fade and Vanilla Sex (1992), Cheryl Dunne

Swoon (1992), Tom Kalin

It Wasn’t Love (1993), Sadie Benning

Fast Trip, Long Drop (1994), Greg Bordowitz

Fresh Kill (1994), Shu Lea Cheang

Go Fish (1994), Rose Troche

Postcards from America (1994), Steve McLean

Super 8 1/2 (1994), Bruce LaBruce

Totally F****d Up (1994), Gregg Araki

Frisk (1995), Todd Verow

Queer cinema is a pastiche of independent filmmaking, experimental approaches, gritty characters, low budgets, and innovative styles. Think of high school dropout Sadie Benning, whose raw and clever Jollies (1992) and It Wasn’t Love (1993) were created using Fisher-Price Pixelvision for under twenty dollars apiece. Or Poison (1991) by Todd Haynes, which tells three stories about a boy killing his abusive father; explicit same-sex love conveyed through prison sex, humiliation, and violence; and flesh-dripping zombie-people as an AIDS metaphor.

Queer cinema is not politically correct. whatever that means. It breaks the boundaries that, in the quest for liberation and gay rights, many of us have inadvertently confined ourselves within. Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994), perhaps the most mainstream of the new queer films. attacks lesbian censorship of lesbians who sleep with men, explores “lesbian bed death,” and acknowledges there are happy nonmonogamous dykes. In The Living End (1992). Gregg Araki unashamedly tells a road story of HIV-positive queer boys that involves murdering fagbashers, psychokiller lesbians, and loads of unsafe sex.

Queer cinema is also about an increased understanding of, appreciation for, and access to the means of production, including both film and video. The economic feasibility of video production allows greater diversity of expression, be it covertly political or a direct attack on issues of race, class, or gender in their intersections with sexuality. It’s about haying an ever-expanding base of gay, lesbian, and alternative film festivals that are looking for fresh new movies.

Unfortunately, it’s also mostly about white boys. As author Cherry Smith says, “Perhaps ‘queer’ is saying, ‘No, this film doesn’t represent you, unless you’re a young, hip, streetwise white boy, or a dyke who’s a wannabe—tough shit.’” That is changing, as queers of color continue to gain access to media production, and film festivals welcome more low budget film and video works by people of color.

Most of all, though, it’s about irreverence, pleasure, biting rage, overt eroticism, grittiness, and a refusal of clean and easy plots, characters, or endings. Perhaps that is the greatest virtue of queer cinema: Despite an ever-increasing pressure toward mainstreaming by many gay men and lesbians, these films get messy.

Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals

Until recently, few mainstream films had positive or accurate portrayals of lesbians and gay men. Independent filmmakers, however, have been creating affirming, thought-provoking, and empowering movies from within the gay and lesbian communities for over two decades. Distribution and presentation of independent films can be a costly and difficult process, often far beyond the means of individual film- and videomakers. Gay and lesbian film festivals provide accessible forums for these artists and their movies. In addition, because many independent films are not feature length, it is more realistic to show them with a series of other films, and festivals organize and show shorts in groupings, often by subject matter. Finally, gay and lesbian film festivals are places where audiences and filmmakers alike can come together and share thoughts, exchange contacts, and enjoy a sense of community. Below is a list of festival cities in the United States:

Albuquerque	Los Angeles	San Antonio
Austin	Milwaukee	San Diego
Atlanta	Minneapolis	San Francisco
Boston	Missoula (Mt.)	Santa Barbara
Champaign (III.)	Mobile (Al.)	Santa Cruz
Chicago	New York	St. Louis
Fresno	Olympia (Wa.)	Tampa
Hartford	Pittsburgh	Tallahassee
Honolulu	Portland (Me.)	Washington
Las Vegas	Sacramento
Long Beach	Salt Lake City

—DANIEL MANGIN

GAYS AND LESBIANS UNDER THE LIGHTS

One of the areas where gay men and lesbians have been most active and successful in creating our own space is in the theater. It has even been said that mainstream theater is gay male theater, partly due to the bohemian nature of the theater culture, and partly due to the large number of gay men involved in theater. The proof is in the pudding: Three of the plays nominated for Broadway’s prestigious Tony Award in 1994 for Best Play were gaythemed. Lesbian representation in the mainstream has been more of a struggle, but there have been many successful lesbian theater companies and lesbian plays in the past twenty-five years.

While we still have a long way to go in bringing a diversity of lesbian and gay voices to the stage, we have come quite a distance. In a sense, theater is one of the few places where gay men have truly “arrived.”

Lesbians and Gay Men on Stage: A Necessarily Incomplete History

“If it weren’t for the Jews, the fags, and the gypsies, there wouldn’t be any theatre.”

Up until roughly the 1960s, portrayals of lesbians and gad men on stage were rather rare, almost universally vague, and heavily “encoded.” In the years that have followed, however, a shift has taken place. and the chief tension in lesbian and gay theatre across the last three decades has occurred not over whether homosexuality ought to he visible, but over how that which “doesn’t show” should he made apparent.

Arguments can and frequently do still crop up over interpreting playwrights “true” intentions for the characters or themes in their plans. Were George and Martha, for example, Edward Albee’s warring, childless husband and wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, actually a barren male couple in “disguise”?—as more than a few scholars and critics have argued. Although he is openly gay. Albee vehemently rejects such an interpretation.

Daring to Speak Our Name

As theatre scholars point out, intentionally visible homosexuality did make its way onto American stages even during the early decades of this century. Kaier Curtin, in We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage, notes that the first lesbian character in an English-language play appeared in The God of Vengeance at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Theatre in 1922, a drama that was popular enough to move to Broadway’s Apollo Theatre the next year. In 1926 The Captive, which premiered on Broadway, renewed the lesbian theme. Largely because of plays like these, theatrical depictions of “sex degeneracy or sex perversion” became illegal in New York State in 1927 under the Wales Padlock Law; in New York City, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst led a “public decency” campaign that resulted in even stricter limitations on Broadway stages. These laws were not repealed until 1967.

The God of Vengeance and The Captive were followed by the “homosexuality as dirty secret” school of theatre, as evidenced by The Children’s Hour (1934), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and even A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), in which the homosexual character, Blanche Dubois’s young husband, whose suicide helps bring about her derangement, is never even seen. By the mid-1960s, explicitly homosexual, though still deranged, characters were much more likely to appear onstage, as in The Killing of Sister George (1965) and Staircase (1966).

But not all gay characters of the time were negative. An alternative, gay-centered voice was raising itself, albeit faintly. As early as 1961, the Caffe Cino playwrights had begun to produce club-style gay theatre for the Greenwich Village art crowd. The talents of gay playwrights Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick, William Hoffman, and Doric Wilson, to name a few, were nurtured there. Cino’s notable contemporaries included the Judson Poets’ Theatre, where the openly gay Reverend Al Carmines wrote and produced early “rock operas,” some dedicated to themes of gay liberation (such as The Faggot, which coincided with his 1973 sermon “We Are All Faggots”).

The landmark gay theatre event of the era was the 1968 stage production of Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band. About Boys, nearly everything has been said: that it helped usher in Stonewall, that its outrageous depictions set gay lib back twenty years, that it is one of the most homophobic plays of all time, that it was one of the first plays to give genuine dimension to the lives of a variety of gay characters. Whatever one’s opinion, Boys in the Band is a standard by which gay theatre was often measured in the two decades that came after, and it contributed to the boisterous new call for “positive” gay characters.

What was considered “positive” depended on who did the evaluating. Somewhat paradoxically, a great many gay plays of the 1970s—chiefly men’s plays—represented aspects of gay life that mainstream theatre would have been pilloried for exploring. They included the loneliness that caused older men to turn to hustlers; the debauchery of innocents by urban gay life; the insularity of the gay ghetto; and the neurotic entanglements and complicated sexual victimizations that occurred among friends, partners, and frustrated would-be lovers.

But the mainstays of 1970s-style gay men’s theatre were plays about relationships—or the unlikelihood of relationships. These nearly archetypal plays, basically lighthearted comedies about tricking, were generally set in the tasteful walk-ups/garden apartments/summer cottages of gay New York and typically showed gay men to be vain, fickle, and aesthetically sophisticated but emotionally shallow. Gay men were also screamingly witty, always ready with the clever put-down or the mordant bon mot. It was a renaissance of the “repartee play” that Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward would have envied (and which they doubtless helped inspire). The casts invariably included several handsome young men; at some point in the course of the play one of them (and maybe more) would have occasion to remove his shirt (and maybe more). Sexuality was the plays’ currency. Far from tackling world-class issues, for most of its first two decades gay theatre was monopolized by white, urban, middle-class, male characters who only occasionally managed to find their way out of the bedroom.

Characteristic of the period are Doric Wilson’s A Perfect Relationship, Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts, Victor Bumbalo’s Kitchen Duty, and Terry Miller’s Pines 79 (the quintessential Fire Island comedy). Reflecting on those years, journalist John F. Karr, then a staff member at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros, quipped that Rhino’s entire costume department in the 1970s consisted of a jockstrap and a flannel shirt.

Gay men’s ambivalence regarding the intersection of physical and emotional intimacy found its counterpoint in a number of lesbian plays of the time, including the popular summer-cottage plays of Jane Chambers. These dramas, in which the heroines fall into committed coupledom at a pace approximately equal to the speed of sound, are perhaps as dated today as are men’s sex farces. Nevertheless, their significance is that they represented the gay situation as many lesbians and gay men wanted it to he seen.

Politics and Art Size Each Other Up

“Positive” representation, though, had its own tensions. If lesbian and gay lives could be accurately described on stage, whom would we be willing to sanction as role models? Did the eternally single, alcoholic dyke (A Late Snow) or the long-coupled lesbian physician dedicated to AIDS work (Falsettoland) seem more “universal”? Were we more likely to admit that Emory, Boys in the Band’s “butterfly in heat,” resembled someone we knew; or was Jed, Ken Talley’s strong, silent (and very hutch) lover in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, the fellow we’d like our parents to meet?

As early as the mid-1970s, lesbian and gay characters had begun to show up, without fanfare, in mainstream hits like Michael Cristofer’s Shadow Box (1977). James Kirkwood’s P.S., Your Cat Is Dead (1975), and even A Chorus Line (1976). Martin Sherman’s Bent was a Broadway smash in 1979, and Jane Chambers’s last Summer at Bluefish Cove enjoyed a long and successful Glines production during 1980 and 1981. international Stud, the first installment of what would become Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, appeared in 1978, and the second two parts followed in 1979. And George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (at The Public in 1986) featured Miss Roj, a fierce and prophetic “Snap Queen” who provides a dire yet dignified warning about “the life habits of a deteriorating society.”

In large part, however, one of the major legacies of post-Stonewall liberation for the dramatic arts was the flourishing of not just gay and gay-inflected theatre but of lesbian and gay theaters as well. Gay and gay-friendly venues such as the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club joined a growing number of American gay and lesbian companies, including Doric Wilson’s The Other Side of Silence (“TOSOS,” founded in 1974); The Glines (1976); Medusa’s Revenge (1978); Ron Tavel and John Vacarro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous and, later, Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company; San Francisco’s The Cockettes (1970–1972) and Angels of’ Light (roughly 1975–1980), and the Gay Men’s Theatre Collective (which broke ground with its 1977 Crimes Against Nature). By the start of the 1980s, as many as two score lesbian and gay theatre companies were operating in the United States.

The Creation of a Theatre of AIDS

In the years since the health crisis began, literally hundreds of AIDS-themed plays have been produced across the country—a tribute both to theatre’s ability to respond to contemporary concerns and to the straggle of artists to come to terms with the devastation of the disease.

Although gay and lesbian theatre was not the only tributary of an authentic “theatre of AIDS” that began to develop after 1984, the most enduring dramatic responses to AIDS have come from lesbian and gay playwrights. One of the earliest of these was The A.I.D.S. Show (1984), a collection of skits and monologues by fourteen writers that was produced at Theatre Rhinoceros. Particular recognition must go to Theatre Rhinoceros for its commitment to plays that explore the gay community’s ongoing response to AIDS. Doug Holsclaw, a contributor to and co-director of The A.I.D.S. Show, later wrote Life of the Party (1986), one of the first plays to be, as Holsclaw put it, “blatant propaganda for safe sex.” Leland Moss’s Quisbies (1988), Robert Pitman’s Passing (1989), Anthony Bruno’s Soul Survivor (1989), Henry Mach’s Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid (1991), Holsclaw’s The Baddest of Boys (1992), and James Carroll Pickett’s Queen of Angels (1993) are only a few of the AIDS plays that have crossed Theatre Rhinoceros’s stage.

Robert Chesley’s Night Sweat (1984) and Jerker (1986), first produced in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, considered the expression and experience of gay male sexuality in the AIDS era. Harvey Fierstein contributed Safe Sex in 1987, a trio of one-acts that zeroed in on AIDS’s impact on intimacy between gay men; and Lanford Wilson’s A Poster of the Cosmos (1988) was a portrait of a man whose search for connection with his dying lover and for a way out of survival guilt leads him to expose himself deliberately to his lover’s infected blood. Dystopian visions of a savage, totalitarian New York City, in which an unnamed plague has annihilated most of the population, were explored in Paul Selig’s Terminal Bar (1985) and Alan Bowne’s Beirut (1986).

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which opened at The Public in 1985, and William Hoffman’s As Is, which moved from Circle Repertory to Broadway just ten days later, are probably the best known examples of the “first generation” of AIDS plays. Kramer’s personal contribution to the theatrical discourse on AIDS is huge, and his later Just Say No (1988) and The Destiny of Me (1992) remain major documents of an era.

No consideration of modern lesbian and gay and AIDS theatre would be complete without a respectful nod to Tony Kushners’sAngels in America, a work so lavish and unprecedented that it almost immediately began to establish new standards. Although nearly six years passed between the time Angels was commissioned by San Francisco’s now-defunct Eureka Theatre and the play’s Broadway debut, Angels avoided aging in the manner of many AIDS plays. Indeed, Angels is a watershed not only in lesbian and gay theatre but in the American dramatic mainstream as well. Now that George C. Wolfe, an openly gay African American man who is largely responsible for bringing Angels to Broadway. Is at the helm of New York’s influential Public Theatre, a new kind of entrée into the world of “legitimate” theatre may become available to lesbian and gay dramatists.

Lesbian and Gay Theatre Learns a Queer Aesthetic

At the same time that AIDS was making its impact on the artistic world—and everywhere else—theatre was also being affected by the arrival of performance art as a popular, more-or-less legitimate, even mainstream dramatic product. For gay and lesbian theatre artists, accustomed as they often were to producing work in out-of-the-way, underfunded venues, performance art was almost made to order. It provided access to queer artists whose work had less often been seen (people of color and women, for example), and, because of spaces like the WOW Cafe in New York; Highways in Los Angeles; the Valencia Rose and its later incarnation. Josie’s, in San Francisco; and others nationwide, small-venue, cabaret-type theatre made a kind of comeback—shades of Caffe Cino.

In a scene from Tony kushner’s award-winning Angels in America—Part 1: Millennium Approaches, the Angel (Lisa Bruneau, right) appears to Prior Walter (Garret Dillahunt, left) in a 1994 A.C.T. production in San Francisco.

Perhaps most importantly, performance art provided, for the emerging “queer” arts community in particular, an immediate venue for the telling of the stories and myths not just of the individual but of the tribe. Although performance art sometime’s furnished the opportunity for an entirely new echelon of artistic self-indulgence, it had the potential to command a degree of attention from the audience and, on the part of the artist, an intensity of purpose that made it extraordinary.

Indeed, performance art has done a great deal to expand the definition of lesbian, gay, and queer theatre. Among those literally creating today’s avante-garde are artists like Kate Bornstein (whose popular shows, including Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, and Virtually Yours, explore her experiences as a transsexual lesbian); Wayne Corbitt (who proclaims in his performance poem Black Birds Boogie in the Black Moonlight—a huge success at the Eighth Annual Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in Seattle in 1991—“What I am is a black, sadomasochistic queer with AIDS”); John Kelly (who “inhabits” characters as diverse as Maria Callas, Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, and Mona Lisa); and Holly Hughes (whose Dress Suits to Hire, World Without End, and Clit Notes: Holly Hughes’s One-Man Show are a reflection on sexual identity that is so kaleidoscopic, instinctive, intimate, hilarious, and even perverse that audiences are stunned).

The Future Begins at Home

For many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer theatre artists, however, access and visibility remain significant obstacles. Blockades come from within the lesbian and gay community and from other segments of society as well. The internationally acclaimed gay troupe PomoAfro-Homos, for example, found themselves unwelcome at the National Black Theatre Festival in 1991 and again in 1993. And when Wayne Corbitt premiered his full-length, five-character play Crying Holy (1993)—the first staged play about gay life written by an openly gay African American man—The Advocate considered it “not news-worthy” enough to cover.

Many aspects of lesbian and gay life are still struggling to appear on stage. Lesbian theatre has demonstrated a certain unwillingness to look forcefully at sexuality (at lesbians who enjoy uncommitted sex or S/M or who sometimes sleep with men, for instance), although notable exceptions include the work of Holly Hughes and the collaborations of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Theatre by gay men, although it has often criticized “promiscuity,” has seldom explored the ways in which white male privilege seriously compromises the meaning of “community” or questioned gay men’s lack of interest in social issues that do not affect them directly. AIDS hasn’t necessarily changed all that, although one of Angels in America’s many breakthroughs was its acknowledgment that some gay men do, in fact, turn tail and nm when their lovers are diagnosed with AIDS. Still, there remains little in gay and lesbian drama to compare with works like All My Sons or A Doll’s House—theatre’s great morality plays.

If the 1980s heralded an opportunity for gay theatre not only to transcend pre-liberation images of psychotic dykes and pathetic queens, but to move beyond the static portrayals institutionalized by gay and lesbian playwrights themselves during the 1910s. lesbian and gay theatre in the 1990s continues to lie molded (and occasionally immobilized) by conflicts between archetype and stereotype, between “otherness” and assimilation, between self-awareness and self-consciousness.

Although gay, lesbian, and even queer theatre cannot continue to be held hostage by the demand for “positive” images, the political and economic realities of our times also mean that the function of theatre in everyday life is changing in complicated ways. Lesbian and gay theatre is subject to all of the forces that are shaping theatre generally across the country: and that “general” theatre, in turn, is influenced (as it has always been) by the talents of gay and lesbian writers and by the extent to which gay life is American life. Such a cross-pollination is always in the process of yielding new crops, but certain continuities remain. Perhaps Emory front Boys in the Band still has a point today when he says that it “takes a fain to make something pretty.”

An Eclectic Collection of Lesbian and Gay Plays

1890s

1896 A Florida Enchantment

1896 At St. Judas’s

1900s

1907 The God of Vengeance

1920s

1925 Spring Cleaning

1926 The Captive

1927 The Drag

1928 Pleasureman

1930s

1932 Girls in Uniform

1934 The Children’s Hour

1937 Wise Tomorrow

1940s

1945 Trio

1946 No Exit

1947 Now Barrabbas

1950s

1953 Something Unspoken

1953 Tea and Sympathy

1954 The Immoralist

1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

1958 Suddenly Last Summer

1960s

1960 Aunt Edwina

1965 The Killing of Sister George

1966 Spitting Image

1966 Staircase

1967 Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star

1967 When Queens Collide

1968 The Boys in the Band

1969 And Puppy Dog’s Tails

1969 Fortune and Men’s Eyes

1970s

1971 Steambath

1972 Coming Out!

1972 Norman, Is That You?

1972 Small Craft Warnings

1973 Camille (the drag version)

1973 The Faggot

1973 Prisons

1973 The Rocky Horror Show

1973 Tubstrip

1975 Boy Meets Boy

1975 A Chorus Line

1975 P.S., Your Cat Is Dead

1975 The Ritz

1977 Gemini

1977 The Shadow Box

1977 The West Street Gang

1978 Fifth of July

1979 Bent

art

Charlotte (Michelle Agnew, right) talks with fellow lesbian bar patron Katherine (Ellen Gerstein) in a 1994 Celebration Theater (Los Angeles) production of Phyllis Nagy’s Girl Bar.

1980s

1980 Last Summer at Bluefish Cove

1981 Forty-Deuce

1983 Blue Is for Boys

1983 La Cage Aux Folles

1983 One**

1983 Torch Song Trilogy

1983 The Well of Horniness

1984 The A.I.D.S. Show**

1984 Night Sweat**

1985 As Is**

1985 Heart of the Scorpion

1985 The Normal Heart**

1985 Terminal Bar**

1985 Vampire Lesbians of Sodom

1985 Warren**

1986 Beirut**

1986 The Colored Museum

1986 Jerker**

1987 Burn This

1987 The Knife

1987 M. Butterfly

1987 Psycho Beach Party

1987 Safe Sex**

1987 Secret War

1988 Just Say No**

1988 A Poster of the Cosmos**

1988 Quisbies**

1989 Passing**

1989 Soul Survivor**

1990s

1991 Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid**

1992 Angels in America**

1992 The Baddest of Boys**

1992 The Destiny of Me**

1992 Falsettos

1992 The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me**

1992 Queens of Angels**

1993 Crying Holy**

1993 Jeffery**

1993 Kiss of the Spider Woman

1993 Twilight of the Golds

1993 Why We Have a Body

1994 Love! Valor! Compassion!

1995 Victor/Victoria

1995 Vita and Virginia

(** denotes plays about AIDS)

FAGGOTS AND DYKES IN YOUR LIVING ROOM

Television—popular culture à la carte—reaches more people more profoundly (and, some would argue, more insidiously) than any other medium. It’s no wonder that gay men and lesbians take an active interest in having accurate portrayals of them-selves on the little screen.

Since the beginning of television, gay imagery, if not gay people, has been visible in one form or another. Drag was a staple of early television comedy, with Uncle Miltie as the reigning king (or queen) of drag. From the late sixties on, many shows had an occasional episode that dealt with lesbian or gay issues. By the mid-seventies, Jody, played by Billy Crystal on the situation comedy Soap, was an openly gay regular. By the nineties, our visibility has continued to increase, both on network and cable television.

But the battle for representation on mainstream television has been an uphill struggle. Accurate representations of gay men and lesbians are often met with great hostility by the religious fundamentalist right, who threaten to boycott companies that sponsor gay-friendly shows. For this reason, if a show makes a bold move and includes positive gay images, it may never be seen again. Such was the case with a 1990 thirtysomething episode that showed two gay men lying in bed together. For syndication purposes, the gay content was edited out, and the episode is noticeably missing from reruns.

In shaping the scope of what is “allowable” on TV, the significance of talk shows, however problematic, cannot be overstated. Ricki Lake had Bob and Rod Jackson-Paris on a Valentine’s special. Phil Donahue has aired lesbians fighting for their right to keep their children. Sally Jesse Raphael had a show in which two gay men battled over whether or not one of them could “go straight.” Such shows get people thinking—and talking—about a diversity of gay and lesbian issues.

art DID YOU KNOW…

The queerest cast in television was that of Bewitched, which ran from 1964 to 1971. Among the gay cast members were one of the two men who played Darrin (Dick Sargent); one of the twins who played Tabitha, the daughter of Darrin and Samantha (Diane Murphy); Paul Lynde, who played Arthur, Samantha’s trickster uncle; and, of course, Samantha’s overbearing mother, Agnes Moorehead.

We are on television, and hundreds of millions of viewers both nationally and internationally can now can enjoy seeing gay people in their very own living rooms on a near-daily basis.

Gay Characters Who Weren’t

For decades there have been certain characters who—to the lesbian or gay viewer—seem so overwhelmingly queer that the stated sexuality of the character is irrelevant. Oh, sure, they might say she’s straight, but girlfriend, we know different! Here are just a few examples of claiming “straight” characters for ourselves:

Barney Fife, sissy lawman, and Gomer Pyle, sissy pumphoy and soldier, The Andy Griffth Show

Phil Donahue’s First Lesbian (And Eighteen other Broadcasting Landmarks)

• Confidential File, first appearance of a gay activist on a talk show, 1954, KTTV-TV, Los Angeles Talk show host Paul Coates devoted a half hour to “the problem” of homosexuality. Panelists included a psychiatrist, a vice squad cop, and “a homosexual.” This gay man used a pseudonym, “Curtis White,” and appeared only in silhouette. Despite these precautions, he told viewers, “I will probably lose my job as a result of the program.” He described the homophile movement, and Coates showed movies of a Mattachine Society discussion group. The day after the show, “Curtis White” did, in fact, lose his job.

• The Army-McCarthy Hearings, first national telecasts to address homosexuality as a social issue, 1954, various TV networks, live coverageSenator Joseph McCarthy included homosexuals on his list of “security threats” who he believed had infiltrated government. Both McCarthy and his opponents in the Army played fast and loose with accusations of homosexuality. For instance, McCarthy said there was an Army base that harbored homosexual soldiers. Several senators promptly announced that wherever the contaminated base might be, it was certainly not in their state. After McCarthy said he got his facts from “a little pixie,” an Army lawyer took a jab at McCarthy’s assistant, Roy Cohn, by quipping, “A pixie is a close relative of a fairy.”

• The Rejected, first nationally aired documentary about homosexuals, 1961, National Educational Television (NET)

Almost forty public TV stations aired this one-hour documentary about gay men, produced in San Francisco by KQED. Early in the show, a psychiatrist explained the Kinsey continuum of sexual orientation. Anthropologist Margaret Mead discussed sociological aspects of homosexuality. A doctor described the unusually high rates of venereal disease among gay men. Mattachine Society board members gave an insider’s viewpoint. Of course. the show ignored lesbians.

• The Eleventh Hour: “What Did She Mean by ‘Good Luck’?”, first network TV drama about lesbianism, 1963, NBC

The Eleventh Hour was a short-lived dramatic series about mental health professionals. One episode focused on Hallie Lambert, a childish, temperamental actress whose tantrums were causing dissent among the cast members of a play. Each time director Marya Stone suggested ways to improve Hallie’s performance, the actress thought Marya hated her. The series’ Freudian-therapist hero finally discovered that Hallie was in lone with Marya and had channeled her denial and confusion into hostility. Aside front this neurotic mental patient, the era’s only pseudo-lesbian TN character was a rifle-toting sniper in a 1962 episode of The Asphalt Jungle.

• C.B.S. Reports: “The Homosexuals,” first commercial network TV documentary about homosexuals, 1967. CBS

During this documentary about gay men, Mike Wallace explained that “the homosexual” is “incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman or, for that matter, a man.” Viewers saw police arrest a nineteen-year-old sailor for having sex in a men’s room. Renowned psychiatrist Charles Socarides said that there are no happy homosexuals. A depressed gay man, hidden behind a potted palm, rambled about how mentally sick he was. Fortunately, the show was much less lurid than CBS’s original 1964 outline for it.

• N. Y.P.D. pilot/premiere: “Shakedown,” first Kay-positive TV drama, 1967, ABC

In this drama, detectives investigated an extortion ring whose members posed as cops to blackmail closeted gay men. One detective visited a homophile activist to see if he had heard anything about the blackmailers. The activist was a successful businessman who traveled the country making gay-themed speeches; he was the first television character to say the words. “I’m homosexual.” The story focused on a closeted gay construction worker whom the criminals were blackmailing. One regular character, a heterosexual black cop, made a strong case for coming out and drew parallels between antigay prejudice and racism.

• The Phil Donahue Show, Phil’s first lesbians, ca. 1968, WLWD, Dayton, Ohio

Lilli Vincenz, longtime activist with the Mattachine Society of Washington, and Barbara Gittings, former editor of The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, traveled to Ohio around 1968 to appear on this early Donahue broadcast. Gittings recalls that Donahue asked excellent questions and that Vincenz exuded a wholesome, “all-American daughter” image throughout. Even so, she says, most of the studio audience were “hostile housewives” who made it clear they were unhappy to be in a room with two lesbians.

This sitcom’s regulars were stock characters: a stereo-typed Jew, a doddering drunkard, a flaming queen, and a two-dimensional bigot. Vincent Schiavelli played the gay character, flamboyant designer Peter Panama. With wrists flailing, Peter would lisp lines like (as the gang watched TV). “Couldn’t we switch to Channel Six? Julia Child is stuffing a wild duck!” One week, he described a recent party he’d attended that was full of weirdos: all married couples. Like most of the few gay characters at the time. Peter was single.

• That Certain Sumner, first TV depiction of a stable, same-gender couple; first network drama to focus on a gay parent; first gay-themed show to win an Emmy award, 1972, ABC

The writers of this TV movie later recalled, “Given the realities of television, we assumed it would have to be written as a short story, or play, or a book.” The story deals with a gay father trying to decide whether to come out to his teenage son. ABC agreed to make the film only if the producers cast big-name stars. Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen played the father and his lover, and Hope Lange played the father’s ex-wife. The gay couple was likable, but the ending implied that there was little emotional support or warmth in their relationship. ABC deleted almost all touching between men in the film. The cuts led to some nonsensical dialogue—such as when Holbrook proclaimed “I don’t like public displays.” referring to two men who had walked past him not holding hands.

• Police Story: “The Ripper,” first network drama rewritten with the consultation of gay activists, 1974, NBC

The Gay Media Task Force and the National Gay Task Force began intensive negotiations with the major TV networks in 1973. Soon after, the producers of Police Story sent NBC a proposed script about an aging queen who butchered young gays who had rejected his advances. The script featured stereotypical, bitter lesbians and a florid gay man who “got that way” because of his mother. NBC told the producers to consult gay activists and draft a more balanced script. In the final version, the serial killer was an antigay psychopath who blamed the gay community for his son’s death: the gay son had died with his lover in a car crash.

• Marcus Welby, M.D.: “The Outrage,” first coordinated national gay campaign against a TV show, 1974, ABC

This series was known for handling tough issues sensitively, so lesbian and gay activists were shocked when ABC approved this simplistic script about a male teacher who raped young boys. The activists pointed out that television’s rare homosexuality-thence dramas tended to focus on false, harmful stereotypes. ABC refused to tone down the script, so gay groups pressured sponsors and stations. By the air date, most of the original sponsors had pulled their ads, and six stations had canceled the episode. Activists had good reasons to worry about TV: in the fall of 1974, every lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transvestite character on a TV drama was a violent criminal.

• Police Won: “Flowers of Evil,” TV’s ultimate killer-dyke drama, 1974, NBC

From 1962 to 1989, the lesbian guest characters on most drama series were dangerous criminals. This Police Woman first went further: it depicted a whole gang of deadly dykes who ran a nursing home. The women robbed, drugged, and occasionally killed the home’s wealthy residents. Ringleader Mame was a scowling, swaggering, cursing ex-Marine who had short hair, wore men’s shirts, and smoked little black cigarettes. “Flowers of Evil” and the controversial Marcus Welby episode have both been withdrawn from syndication. Curious individuals can view “Flowers of Evil” in New York at the Museum of Television and Radio.

• Cage Without a Key, TV’s first—and almost only—gay African American character, 1975, CBS

This TV movie, a juvenile reformatory drama, broke ground in presenting a self-identified gay African American teenager: Tommy, a young lesbian who was stabbed to death near the film’s end. She was a sympathetic character who befriended and protected the show’s straight, white hero (Susan Dey). Other black gay characters on TV have included a male photographer in Sins (1986), the doomed lesbian couple in The Women of Brewster Place (1989), campy film critics Blaine and Antoine on In Living Color (1990–1994), and Andrew’s brother on Roc (1991).

• Soap, first successful sitcom with a gay regular character, 1977–1981, ABC

Soap was not the first series with a gay male regular: The Corner Bar (1972), Hot*l Baltimore (1975), and The Nancy Walker Show (1976) preceded it. Soap, however, was a hit. Jody (Billy Crystal) was sweet, proud, non-stereotypical, and very out. Many isolated gay teenage viewers embraced him as a role model. Still, there were ambiguities. In early episodes, Jody said he had “always felt like a woman” and talked of having gender-reassignment surgery; by the final season, he was dating women, but still identified himself as gay. Some viewers complained that Soap’s writers didn’t know a transsexual from a homosexual from a bisexual.

• St. Elsewhere: “AIDS and Comfort,” first network drama to deal with AIDS, 1983. NBC

A married, apparently straight city councilman was diagnosed with “the controversial disease AIDS,” as one TV listing put it. His revelation of homosexuality jeopardized his political future and domestic life. As word spread that the hospital had an AIDS patient, participation in blood drives plummeted. By the time this first AIDS drama aired, AIDS had been in the news more than two years; the Centers for Disease Control had documented 3,000 cases in the U.S., of which 1,300 had been fatal. No other prime-time network drama was to address AIDS again until two years later. when CBS aired Trapper John. M.D.: “Friends and Lovers” and NBC presented the .TV movie An Early Frost.

• HeartBeat, first series with a lesbian couple as regulars. 1988–89, ABC

Wise, capable nurse-practitioner Marilyn McGrath (Gail Strickland) and her lover Patti, a caterer, were regulars on this sudsy medical drama. Their participation in the plot was casual, and their lesbianism was an accepted fact of life among Marilyn’s cu-workers. Marilyn and Patti were well-developed characters, generally convincing as a couple. Unlike the show’: straight couples, how-ever, they rarely touched: the writers contrived all manner of household tasks to keep their hands busy.

• L.A. Law, first full, on-the-lips kiss between women on a network drama, 1991, NBC

L.A.Law’s famous “lesbian kiss” actually involved a straight character, Abby, and her bisexual friend, C.J. Reaction from gay and bisexual viewers, especially women, was favorable and strong. Phones buzzed. People mailed videotapes back and forth across the continent. Many had L.A. Law parties to watch and rewatch that nervous kiss. Since then, over 4,000 hours of prime-time network programming have passed, vet people still talk about this broadcast. The importance of this two-second kiss, even years later, says something powerful about the inadequate portrayal of lesbigay lives during the intervening years.

• Northern Exposure: “The Wedding,” first same-gender union ceremony between recurring TV characters, 1994, CBS

Eric and Rob’s family, friends, and neighbors gathered to celebrate the two men’s love in a wedding ceremony and banquet. The happy couple had appeared on the series off and on for several years. In this episode, they exchanged rings and vows, but no spit: CBS said they had to kiss off-camera. The same month, Fox-TV cut male-male kissing from a heterosexually sordid episode of Melrose Place. ABC, CBS, and NBC have shown lip-to-lip kisses between women (Roseanne, Picket Fences, L.A. Law), but kissing between men remains taboo.

• IKEA commercial, first mainstream commercial about a gay couple, 1994, various stations

Steve and Mitch—a comfy, white, middle-class, thirtysomething couple—told why they bought their first “serious dining room table” at an IKEA furniture store. Mitch explained that they chose a table with an expansion leaf because “a leaf means staying together, commitment.” Countless straight viewers probably now think that table leaves have some special significance for gay couples. Right-wing groups, furious at the depiction of gay men as “normal,” threatened to boycott. But most of the boycotters were nowhere near an IKEA store, so the threat had little impact. New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote of the commercial, “Certainly it makes me feel better about IKEA. But I still wouldn’t let that dreary table anywhere near my house.”

… And the Women Who Love Them Talk Show Topics Through the Ages

Today, queer panels are what keep talk shows in business. In Februrary 1993 alone, more than a dozen nationally broadcast talk-show segments dealt with homosexuality. Almost all talk shows now let lesbians and gay men speak for themselves. Below is a small sampling of the ways in which radio and TV discussion shows have approached lesbian and gay lives.

1954

“Homosexuals and the Problem They Present” (Confidential File, KTTV-TV, Los Angeles)

1955

“Homosexuals Who Stalk and Molest Children” (Confidential File, syndicated TV)

1958

1959

“Should the Homosexual Marry?” (Psychologically Speaking, WEVD radio, New York)

1961

“How Normal Are Lesbians?” (Psychologically Speaking, WEVD radio, New York)

1962

National Convention of the Daughters of Bilitis. (Paul Coates Interviews, syndicated TV)

1966

Why are homosexuals picketing the U.S. government? (various local talk shows, Washington, D.C.)

1967

1970

Rev. Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Church. (The Phil Donahue Show, syndicated TV)

1971

“Should the State Recognize Homosexual Marriages?” (local broadcast, Minneapolis-St. Paul)

PBS’s The David Susskind Show discusses “Gay Men and Lesbians in the Professions” in 1974. Guests included a professor, a registered nurse, an activist/journalist and a doctor.

1973

“A Night at the Continental Baths” (The Pat Collins Show, WCBS-TV, New York)

1974

1975

1977

“The Threat of Militant Homosexuality” (The 700 Club, syndicated TV, Christian Broadcasting Network)

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1988

1889

1990

“Pastors Playing with Perversion” (The 700 Club, syndicated TV/Christian Broadcasting Network)

1991

“Lesbians and Gay Men Raising a Baby” (Sally Jessy Raphael, syndicated TV)

“Dumping Your Husband for Another Woman.” (The Oprah Winfrey Show, syndicated TV)

1992

1993

“Interracial Adoption and Homosexuality” (Sally Jessy Raphael, syndicated TV)

Gay Men, Lesbians, and the Cable TV Revolution

Gay and lesbian cable television shows have been around almost as long as cable television. The first known gay cable show was produced by the Gay Activists Alliance in 1971—a weekly call to arms in the infancy of the modern movement. Next came Emerald City, first produced in 1977 on Manhattan Cable’s leased access Channel J by the late gay pioneer Frank O’Dowd. It was gay in the way that After Dark magazine was gay—covering gay-associated and campy entertainment news without being explicitly gay. O’Dowd was a roving entertainment reporter who featured such per-formers as Weyland Flowers and his catty marionette alter ego, Madame, drag star Divine, and local cabaret acts.

Following that, in the late 1970s, lesbian film critic Marcia Pally and the late film historian Vito Russo (of The Celluloid Closet fame), both activists, briefly took gay TV on the air with a weekly show on WNYC, a public station in New York. Lily Tomlin (as Mrs. Beadsley) was one of the featured guests of this short-lived show.

Cable TV pioneer Lou Maletta got his start producing male erotica (Men and Films) in 1982 in New York, but quickly recognized his obligation to incorporate short news segments, especially about the rapidly unfolding AIDS epidemic. Maletta now produces eight programs, some of which are seen in as many as twenty-two cities. He has sent crews to get the gay scoop on both the Democratic and Republican conventions since 1984. And his Gay Cable Network was the first gay electronic medium to secure White House press credentials. He is one of a growing number of producers that network their programming, including Gay Entertainment Television (GET), which puts its shows up on satellite so that people with dishes can pull them in.

Another early pioneer was Butch Peaston, who produced the public access (and occasionally UHF) show Out! In the 80’s (later changed to Out! In the 90’s) from 1986 to 1993 live each Wednesday night in New York for an hour. Peaston brought an immediacy to gay television, allowing for call-ins and dialogue with the audience.

Today, many big cities—and some smaller ones—feature some gay and/or lesbian cable TV shows. Some still focus on entertainment and sexual matters. But the vast majority are produced by unpaid local activists with a desire to get the word out about what’s going on within the local gay community and to spread gay news from the rest of the country, often culled front mainstream newspapers and gay publications, but also through original reporting.

Cable systems are obliged to make room on their access channels for all programs produced by community groups as long as “community standards” of obscenity are not violated. In the more conservative areas of the country, these standards have gotten some gay shows in trouble. On Manhattan Cable, the only restriction on content is a ban on showing insertive sex. That leaves a lot of things on Manhattan Cable that out-of-towners are shocked by, but programmers still have fights over the right to show such things as explicit safer sex demonstrations for educational purposes. In many other cities around the country, cable companies often exile gay programming to the wee hours of the morning even if the show is devoid of sexual content.