14 ▼ fo b n ia r y 1 7 . 1 8 9 5 ▼ ju s t o u t
D ancing T hrough a C entury of S creen / mages
The English were somewhat more progres
sive, having by this time received but not acted
upon the Wolfenden Report, which recommended
decriminalizing homosexual acts between con
senting adults. Their frank portrayals of homo
sexuality in Victim and A Taste o f Honey (and two
1960 films about Oscar Wilde) had the same effect
on Hollywood as the heterosexual frankness of
’50s films from France, Italy and Sweden—show
ing there was a buck to be made by treating adult
audiences as adults. Such subject matter was at
this point beyond the range of television, and
widescreen and 3-D processes had by then lost the
novelty that gave the movies a brief competitive
edge over the younger medium.
It must be hard for those of Generation X and
younger to imagine what our lives were like in the
darkened theaters of that age. In his introduction to
Gays and Film, which he edited, Richard Dyer
cites “what Claude Lévi-Strauss has termed
‘bricolage,’ that is, playing around with the ele
ments available to us in such a way as to bend their
meanings to our own purposes. We could pilfer
from straight society’s images on the screen such
that would help us build up a subculture, or what
Jack Rabuscio calls a ‘gay sensibility.’ ”
We could, in other words, watch a love scene
and identify with the character of the gender
opposite to our own, so that we were in the arms of
Clark Gable or Marilyn Monroe or whoever turned
us on. This remains a primary source of fantasy
today.
Bricolage (literally, tinkering) also allowed us
to imagine what happened when the lights went
out in all-male or all-female settings such as pris
ons, barracks and submarines; and to think of the
heroes of “buddy movies” as another kind of
“buddies.” There’s no overt reason for Thelma
and Louise to be lesbian role models.
Cross-dressing has always existed in the mov
ies, usually for comic purposes and never with
anything but the slightest, teasingest hint of any-
Continued from previous page
Left to right: Longtime Companion, Go Fish and John Waters’ Hairspray
thing sexual. Had anyone taken the ending of
Some Like it Hot seriously— with Joe E. Brown
unfazed (“nobody’s perfect!”) by Jack Lemmon’s
revelation of his true gender— it would have been
seen as a sign that the end of the world was near.
There have always been gay and lesbian char
acters, but for most of movie history they weren’t
identified as such. They were innocuous sissies
and tomboys; and if they were too old to be “going
through a phase,” they were as impossible as your
own parents to imagine in sexual situations. Such
actors as Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett
Horton and Grady Sutton, whatever their real
orientation, built their careers on playing effemi
nate supporting characters— usually valets, desk
clerks and other servile positions. Clifton Webb,
who was gay, advanced to leading roles, as Mr.
Belvedere and similarly asexual characters.
The more serious the gay or lesbian character
was, the more villainous (e.g., Hope Emerson’s
prison matron in Caged, Farley Granger and John
Dali’s fictionalized Leopold and Loeb in Rope)',
hence the more harshly they had to be dealt with in
the end.
it f/t My- PtcA4Wlt
Perverts, inverts—
no chance to subvert
I
n his illustrated lecture “Psycho Killers and
Twisted Sisters,” a staple on the queer festival
circuit, educator and historian Daniel Mangin
points out that films reflect the period in which
they are made, not that in which they’re set. When
the movies began to deal openly with homosexual
ity in the early ’60s they embraced the prevailing
“wisdom” that we were sick, perverted, and if
human, only barely so. “Films are only a small part
of what I call a symphony of information and
disinformation about gays and lesbians,” Mangin
says.
He notes that as lesbians (e.g., Barbara Stanwyck
in Walk on the Wild Side) were depicted as treach
erous creatures who would do anything to hold on
to their “girls,” espionage was the perfect occupa
tion for them. Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb in From
Russia With Love is a quintessential example.
In the late ’40s and early ’50s Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, aided by the closeted Roy Cohn, linked
homosexuality to communism and miscegenation
as elements that threatened the “American” way of
life. Is it any wonder the movies showed queers
that way, subtly in the ’50s and less so in the ’60s;
or that those of us who grew up in that period were
starved for positive images and role models? (You
think it’s bad today...)
It wasn’t a question of homophobia. Even well-
intentioned, liberal filmmakers swallowed the line
that we were sick, pathetic creatures, more to be
pitied than censured. William Friedkin eventually
apologized for the portrait he painted of us in his
1980 film Cruising', but even in the ’90s Jonathan
Demme made The Silence o f the Lambs without
realizing how his queer serial killer played into the
hands of the radical right.
By the end of the 1960s the Production Code
had been scrapped in favor of the earliest form (G,
M, R, X) of the current rating system. While some
of the letters have changed, the ratings, then as
now, maintained a double standard for gay and
straight sex, as for male and female frontal nudity,
with the former in each case being rated more
restrictively.
BRADLEY J. WOODWORTH
ATTORNEY AT LAW
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