THOUGH IT’S my ninth book, Gay Directors, Gay Films? is my first truly personal work—for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s written in honor of my late companion, Rob Remley, who passed away on September 27, 2011. A former Merce Cunningham dancer and a top executive in the film industry (Sony, New Line, Time/Warner), Rob was an extraordinary man in many different ways. Having spent thirty-one years of happiness and fulfillment together, I cannot think of another individual who has influenced my career and shaped my life more significantly than Rob. My loss and grief are indescribable, and rather than engaging in therapy (as most of my friends recommended), I decided to channel my sorrow into writing a tribute book for Rob that would reflect in spirit and in essence the kinds of informal and spontaneous discussions that we used to have after seeing films, dances, and other art forms. Incidentally, we seldom disagreed about the quality or impact of a film; it was always a matter of the extent or degree to which we liked or responded to a particular film.
Second, the book is personal due to its subject matter. I have written comprehensive biographies of two major Hollywood directors: George Cukor: Master of Elegance (1993) examines George Cukor (1899–1983), who was openly gay (sort of living an open secret life), and Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer (2009) considers Vincente Minnelli (1903–1986), who was a latent homosexual, opting for heterosexual marriage and children (he was married four times and had two daughters). One goal of these books was to elevate the stature of two extremely gifted filmmakers whose critical standing and reputation had suffered, albeit in different ways, due to their sexual orientation.
Third, Gay Directors, Gay Films? is the first book in which I subject myself to self-criticism, paying attention to how my sexual orientation and social background as a white, gay, upper-middle-class male influences, directly and indirectly, consciously and subconsciously, the ways I read films made by openly gay directors. In this, I follow the lead of gay theories, which no longer limit themselves to the analysis of overtly homosexual images but embrace other aspects and images of film that may be “gayer” or “queerer” in meaning than the explicitly gay ones.
In the early 1970s, while spending a summer in Paris, my relatives enrolled me in a course offered by one of the colleges of the Sorbonne. The charismatic teacher of that course, which was devoted to French literature, exposed me to a perspective called explication du texte, in which she analyzed according to different yardsticks classic novels by Flaubert, Zola, and others. I have always wanted to apply tenets of this approach to my scholarship and decided to do it in writing Gay Directors, Gay Films?
Finally, more than any of my previous books, Gay Directors, Gay Films? has benefited from my dual academic background in social sciences as well as cultural and film studies. The book’s key organizational principle is career, which is more of a sociological than a uniquely filmic concept. And though I apply the notions of worldview and sensibility to the realm of film, the concepts themselves are broad, deriving from philosophy, history, and other fields. The following text also integrates the duality of my career as a full-time professor and a full-time film critic (Variety, Screen International), a career inspired by my great Columbia teacher and mentor, Andrew Sarris.