ju st o u t ▼ ftb r u ir y 17. 1 00S ▼ 13
C entury
of S creen
I mages
While there have been lesbian
and gay filmmakers as long
as there have been film s,
most have been hidden
in the closets o f history
by Steve Warren
Dancing in the closet
audiences. The difference was that those who went
to see Philadelphia expected to be lectured to and
taught a lesson, as they expect to hear a sermon
n The Celluloid Closet the late Vito Russo cites
when they go to church. Mrs. Doubtfire and Four
The Gay Brothers as probably the earliest queer
Weddings made their points more subversively,
image on film. Made in 1895 by William
through pure entertainment. If the lesson sneaks in
Dickson at the Thomas Edison Studio, the experi
while you’re laughing, it’s harder to dismiss.
mental film showed two men waltzing together. It
When we talk about breakthroughs in queer
would be many years before the screen would even
portrayals in Hollywood movies we’re talking in
hint at what happened when the music stopped.
relative terms. The real advances have always
While Hollywood confined us to stereotypical
come from independent and foreign films, and
roles in comedies (e.g., I923’s The Soilers), the
movies made for television, including cable.
Germans dealt openly with male homosexuality in
Beyond the situation comedies and dramatic
Different from the Others (1919), Mikael (1924)
series, most of which,
and Sex in Bondage
in the last 20 years or
(1928); and with les
Television has consistently been
so, have done an
bianism in Pandora's
obligatory “gay epi more progressive than the cinema
Box (1928) and
sode’’ (and a few—
in dealing with gay and lesbian
Maedchen in Uniform
Mary Hartman Mary
(1931). The Third
issues. Consider That Certain
Hartman,
Soap,
Reich put a stop to it
Summer, An Early Frost,
Foley
Square,
as surely as the less
Roseanne, Melrose
blatant fascists who
Consenting Adult, Our Sons,
Place and the origi
i nst i t ut ed
And the Band Played On, and
nal concept for Love
Holly wood’s Produc
Sidney— have had
Tales o f the City.
tion Code in the early
continuing queer
1930s.
characters), television has consistently been more
The 1961 British drama Victim, with gay actor
progressive than the cinema in dealing with gay
Dirk Bogarde as a closeted lawyer confronting
and lesbian issues. Consider That Certain Sum
blackmailers who preyed on queers, was revolu
mer, A Question o f Love, An Early Frost, Consent
tionary in its day. Hollywood was just changing the
ing Adult, Our Sons, And the Band Played On, and
MPAA Code to allow homosexuality to be dealt
Tales o f the City. Where did we get the expression
with openly, as long as it was “treated with care,
“too much for television”? These were too much
discretion and restraint.” That meant essentially
for movie theaters.
that gay men and lesbians had to be villains or, if
It was less risky to make these films for TV, yet
decent people, still had to be punished—usually by
this “limitation” helped them reach a far wider
death—for their “sin.”
audience in a single night than they would have in
months of theatrical exhibition.
Continued on next page
I
Clockwise from top: Last Call at Maud’s, Orlando, Prick Up Your Ears, And the Band Played On,
The Crying Game and Consenting Adult
year ago we held our collective breath
awaiting the release of Philadelphia.
If it had a big opening weekend, we
were told, 200 films about AIDS would
go into production the following week.
It would do for HIV and AIDS what,
earlier, Making Love was supposed to do for the
subject of gay men in general.
Philadelphia was successful, but the other AIDS
films haven’t followed. Jeffrey has been shot on a
minimal budget in New York, and Barbra Streisand
is still trying to decide whether The Normal Heart
will be her next project or the one after that. Robert
Altman hasn’t started on Angels in America, Francis
Coppola hasn’t mentioned his AIDS film lately,
and Outbreak, about a killer virus, will probably
have as much direct connection to HIV as Dying
Young or the remake of The Blob.
But we’re used to reading between the lines,
because that’s where our stories have always been
told.
The success of Philadelphia has been attrib
uted to the popularity of its star, Tom Hanks.
Because of its subject, industry thinking goes, it
didn’t gross as much as his films on either side of
A
it, Sleepless in Seattle and Forrest Gump. In Hol
lywood, unlike with a box of chocolates, we al
ways know what we’re going to get: screwed.
The real queer cinema breakthrough last Christ
mas season hasn’t been talked about as much. Mrs.
11 Doubtfire
years earned three times as much as Philadel
phia, despite having gay actors Harvey Fierstein
and Scott Capurro portraying a gay couple. It
wasn’t their movie—the main character was a
straight man in a dress—but they quietly showed
that a gay relationship can be more stable than
straight ones, and they were casually affectionate
without doing anything that would send people
screaming from the theater.
The point was reinforced a few months later—
with only one gay actor, Simon Callow, in the gay
couple—in the sleeper hit Four Weddings and a
Funeral. That the funeral involved one of the gay
characters was no more surprising to historians of
queer cinema than the fact that the film was neither
made nor released by a major Hollywood studio,
but the overwhelmingly gay-positive aura sur
rounding its heterosexual love story was a pleasant
shock.
All three films were made primarily for straight