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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 15, 2001)
june 15.2001 ’ You've come a long way, baby? Life outside the celluloid closet poses new conundrums for queers looking for silver-screen mirrors by C hristopher M c Q uain uring the early ’90s, the time to which we can trace the increasingly queer-conscious sensitivity of many of today’s films, a backlash against Reagan/Bush had creat ed an atmosphere bordering on the reactionary. Political correctness was the controversy du jour, and films like Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (which featured a psychotic transsexual) and Paul Verho even’s Basic Instinct (psychotic bisexual) attracted small but loud boycotts from the queer community. These protests were—as is often the case regardless of which side one happens to be on—rather inarticulate and probably unwarranted, accomplishing nothing much more than pro viding free publicity for these supposedly “ignorant,” “dan gerous" movies, both of which went on to become huge hits. But underneath the apparently fruitless commotion, another trend began to snowball: Demme’s next project was Philadelphia, an AIDS drama starring America’s Everyman, Tom Hanks, as a gay lawyer who is clearly a protagonist with whom the audience—gay and straight alike—is meant to empathize. While promoting the film, Demme frequently implied that he chose the project specifically to dis prove the idea that he was homophobic; Hanks later was given a Best Actor Oscar for the role. This was also the period during which Entertainment Weekly named the Gay and Les bian Alliance Against Defamation one of Hol lywood's most powerful entities. Then the Los Angeles Times described the organization, founded in 1985 to protest misinformation about AIDS, as possibly the most successful group ever to be formed for the purpose of lob bying the media for inclusion. There was no mistaking it: Although queers certainly had played a behind-the-scenes part in the movies since their inception, the ’90s was the decade we truly arrived, by way of the Santa Monica office and the Burbank board- room, in Des Moines cineplexes and Peoria liv ing rooms. D lash-forward to the present: Will S’ Grace is one of the most popular shows on televi sion; the queer-written American Beauty swept the 2000 Oscars. And happily, in addi tion to keeping the “gay film” genre well- stocked with small, independent romantic comedies and coming-out/coming-of-age stories that are “by gay, for gay” and demographically targeted as such, postmillennial Hollywood seems almost entirely unafraid of regularly pre senting homosexuality as something palatable to middle America. F blood queers possessed of flaws, feelings and a sexuality that extended to the bedroom. More recently, Sandra Bullock’s 28 Days was buoyed by a silly German queen who popped up amid the alcoholism and drug addiction whenever comic relief was needed, and a fading-pop-star sidekick appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary just long enough to be gay before being buried by the film’s real story. On a slightly higher plane, there’s the “ennobling” story, the film that painstakingly goes out of its way to placate a gay audience and make the straight audience feel progressive and liberal. Philadelphia, the quintessential ennobling movie, made admirable strides toward complex characterization and rightly made the point that no person with AIDS “deserves” the disease. But to those unwilling to divide the film world into the simplistic, black-and-white cate gories of “positive” and “negative” representa tion, crucial questions remain unanswered: Is it enough, or even desirable, to have reassuringly “positive” (happy, well-adjusted, self-confident) queer characters populating the mostly hetero sexual world of mainstream cinema? What constitutes a “responsible” depiction of us? Can heterosexual filmmakers making movies for a mostly straight demographic present authenti- cally queer subject matter in a meaningful way? Who gets to decide what “queer-positive” actually means? Isn’t Will Tru man about as exemplary of gay male life as The Cosby Show was of the black male experience during the ’80s? Wonder Boys The most frequent and easy The film’s problem was more subtle and way the entertainment industry insidious than the obvious patronizing of the has seen fit to include queers is sidekick flicks; it was a picture of suffering so through a phenomenon I call glamorized and Ralph Lauren-tasteful that any “sidekicking.” In many post- real pathos was lost. Hanks played a comfort GLAAD Hollywood films, the able, well-off WASP-bred professional who gay best friend frequently plays found himself on the wrong side of a system hag to the central character, that previously had enabled him to live a grati often a heterosexual woman fying guppie lifestyle. with problems. Nathan Lane was Michelle Pfeiffer’s sidekick in 199l’s Frankie & Johnny, Peter Friedman was Bridget Fonda’s in 1992’s Single White Female, and Rupert Everett, whose vocation seems to be that of The Gay Best Friend, has done it twice: for Julia Roberts in 1998’s My Best Friend's Wedding and for Madonna in 2000’s The Next Best Thing (both of which, aside from the dubi ously trendy, superfluous, asexual and ultimate ly disposable nature of the sidekick roles, were terrible films). In a slight twist to the cliché, last year’s Bounce featured a man (Ben Affleck) in the traditionally female role, taking advice Opting to ignore the brutal ironies inherent on his love life from a gay character (Johnny in the story, which practically begged for fur Galecki) who seemed to exist for the sole pur ther-reaching social commentary or even black pose of uniting the straight couple. humor, the filmmakers allowed it to become a Despite being directed by tediously inoffen Hallmark-sentimental bit of fluff that inadver sive television graduate Garry Marshall (Pretty tently trivialized the Big KMKSra Woman), Frankie & Johnny stood out tn the Issues it wanted to drive home. Demme might have queer-sidekick category, meant for Philadelphia to be an as the play upon which olive branch to the gay com the film was based (by munity , but in retrospect, Terrence McNally, Lambs is by far the better, author of Love! Valour! more authentic film. Compassion! and the gay Lesbians achieved the world’s resident feel same quasi-noble status in good playwright) at least films such as The Other Sister, spared Lane’s lovable 'phia another Garry Marshall greet- downstairs neighbor from total neutering by tossing in a blink-and- i ing card in which Diane Keaton generously acknowledged that, you’ll-miss-him boyfriend. like her mentally disabled daughter (Juliette Single White Female and Bounce were singu Lewis), her lesbian daughter also was worthy of larly disappointing; both had characters whose acceptance. In last year’s Dr. T & the Women, queemess was pointless to the film except as an Liv Tyler and Kate Hudson played a couple empty PC badge, and both had scripts by Don whose secret relationship and its accompanying Roos, an openly gay screenwriter whose direc worries, like the cares of most of the women in torial debut, 1998’s sardonic, earthily hilarious the film, were really nothing more than silly The Opposite of Sex, proved he was capable of ephemera to he suffered gracefully by the noble creating a genuinely intelligent and honest cel male characters. luloid world that included complex, flesh-and- he most reassuring, genuinely queer-inclu sive attempts in cinema have seemed to come with a newfound worldliness on the parts of some writers and directors who’ve cre ated stories wherein characters’ homosexuality is a simple fact that is not their only defining characteristic and neither impedes nor assists their place in the film’s milieu. Kathy Bates’ smart, strong-willed Washington lesbian in Pri mary Colors and Paul Reubens’ hip queer drug dealer in Blow are not "gay characters” added for spice or grandiosity; they’re characters who are both essential to their films and simply happen to be gay. Homosexuality is similarly a nonissue in films like last year’s acclaimed Wonder Boys and the works of hypercreative writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). In the former, worldly but world-weary col lege professor Michael Douglas thinks nothing of finding a student (Tobey Maguire) in bed with his editor (Robert Downey Jr.); it’s quite in character for both of them. In Anderson’s films, the homosexuality of the fraught and some what desperate gay characters causes no perceptible contrast or conflict with their fraught and somewhat desperate heterosexual counterparts. Neil LaBute’s 1998 effort Your Friends & Neighbors, a satire of the atrocities of modem love, included the twisted rela tionship of a lesbian couple (Catherine Keener and Nastassja Kinski) that equaled the film’s straight relationships dysfunction for dysfunction. In the crowded and lively small-budget gay independent film world, the most advanced, interesting fare is not the ubiquitous, celebrato ry romantic comedy (trick, Jeffrey, The Broken Hearts Club, Better Than Chocolate) but works that challenge audience expectations and rede fine the boundaries of what a “gay film” is and should be. Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner, the team behind Go Fish, 1995’s lesbian cinematic precursor to Sex and the City, moved on to more complicated stories; Troche directed 1998’s Bedrooms & Hallways, a sophisticated social satire and comedy of manners dealing with bisexuality and postmillennial gender roles. Turner co-wrote and starred in Mary Harron’s film adaptation of American Psycho, turning what many thought was a misogynistic novel into a story of class and sexual warfare with a decidedly queer/progressive perspective. The important thing for the queer surveyor and consumer of pop culture to remember, however, has less to do with subjective assess ments of "positive,” “negative" and “accurate” representation than with the fact that no fic tion ever can reflect identically the multifari ous real-life experiences of a community as diverse as ours. Acknowl edging the pleasing and still relatively new open ness toward queers can and should be accompa nied by the healthy skep ticism that inspires those who continue to feel marginalized to tell their own stories. Our need for cultural mirrors is inevitable and human; our task is to create or lobby for the creation of a spectrum of reflections as pris matic as possible. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. JF1 T C hristopher M c Q uain is a free-lance pop culture obsessive who is producing and directing his first short script, Do You Remember Shark boy? • 7
