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? •
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