aupml 2. 2002 »
BOOKS
^ ¡¡p o consecutively read William J. Mann’s
Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians
Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969 (Viking,
2001) and John M. Clum’s “H e’s All
Man”: Learning Masculinity, Gayness and Love
from American Movies (Palgrave Macmillan,
2002) is to make a study in contrasts. One is a
cornucopia of legitimate, rigorously researched
history; the other is a
purportedly “intellectu
al” tome that’s often so
pretentious, self-indul
gent and just silly as to
he laughable.
Mann’s book is, for
the most part, a pleasure
to read. His mission is
not so much to show us
how homosexuality was
depicted by Hollywcxxl
as to illustrate how it
was lived in Holly
wood— from the silent
era through the eventual
collapse of the studio
system in the ’60s.
Though gay and les
bian actors and actresses
do pop up with some fre
quency, their stories play
second fiddle to those of
the throngs of queer
screenwriters, set decorators, makeup artists
and directors who (in tme pop culture tradi
tion) hadn’t a fraction of the celebrity the pub
lic afforded to movie stars.
Behind the Screen is a true queer movie edu
cation. Meticulously documented via newspa
per clippings, personal letters, biographies, film
magazines and the author’s own interviews are
the work, lives and loves of queer directors and
producers like George Cukor, James Whale,
Clifton Webb, Vincente Minnelli, Dorothy
Arzner and Ross Hunter.
Screenwriters are included, too, like Zoe
Akins and DeWitt Bodeen, and so, of course,
are the myriad gay set designers, costumers and
choreographers. (Mann provides valuable con
text regarding the division of labor and how it
came to be, for males especially, that one could
be more openly gay in the fashion and design
departments, whereas a queer screenwriter had
to he much more circumspect.)
It’s to Mann’s credit that almost every page
offers something enlightening or tantalizing. 1
never would have thought reading about a
movie called Curse o f the C at People would
make me want to see it so badly. And who
knew that William Reynolds, the editor who
cut both the beloved Godfather and the notori
ous Ishtar, was gay?
Hollywood queer
The good, the had and the unauthorized
in queer film books
by
C h r i s t o p h e r M c Q u a in
The ebb and flow of
what Mann sees as Hol
lywood’s essential contra
diction— a colony of cre
ative freethinkers who
(at least during the time
period covered by the
book) had to present an
image to please conserva
tive heartland denizens—
runs throughout, from
the relatively queer-lib
Roaring ’20s to the vary
ing types and degrees of
repression during the sub
sequent Depression,
Decency Q xJe and
McCarthy eras.
Behind the Screen
offers, along with its
juicy-but-true
movieland stories, a fas
cinating look at the way
America’s political
moods directly affect the entertainment
industry and, by immediate extension, the
level of honesty, comfort and even safety with
which gay men and lesbians working in the
movies could live their lives.
My only complaints are that Mann is inter
mittently too reverent, as if determined to turn
each and every Hollywcxxl nonheterosexual
into a saint, and that his final chapter flirts with
bland modem identity-politicking. Though his
point that pre-Stonewall Hollywcxxl had queers
less pigeonholed than it did throughout the 70s
and ’80s is well taken, I could’ve
done without yet another rote,
blanket proclamation that
William Friedkin’s Cruising is
“offensive to gays.”
ne feels uncomfortable,
however, harboring any
reservations about Mann’s
very valuable and readable
book after reading Clum’s
floundering dip into the decon-
structive pool.
“He’s All Man"— with its
embarrassingly inept deploy
ment of fancy terms such as
“domestic space” and “male
gaze”— basically consists of a
fourth-rate application of the
theories in Laura Mulvey’s
extremely influential 1975
essay “Visual Pleasure and Nar
rative Cinema.” But where
Mulvey used sophisticated lan
guage to convey sophisticated
(if debatable) ideas, Clum uses
unnecessarily pretentious ver
biage to convey literal-minded,
reductive ones.
The author systemically
traces representations of gender
and sexuality in American
films— from ’50s Westerns to
present-day gay-produced
romantic comedies— under the
misguided notion that people should go to the
movies to be “affirmed" and that movies that
don’t affirm us— that don’t show the world the
way it “should” be— are deficient.
To be fair, Clum’s assertions aren’t all inaccu
rate. Certainly, there has been more than a tinge
of homophobia in the sly depictions (or, more
usually, the absence) of gay men and lesbians in
many Hollywcxxl movies. His passages dealing
with the ideas of gender order in the works of
Tennessee Williams and the way in which the
more radical notions were purged from screen
versions do make for interesting reading.
It’s Clum’s tone that irks to distraction; his
paranoia finds homophobia, heterosexism and
patriarchy (or corrective subversions thereof)
in every movie about which he writes. With
his rambling, humorless ■jargon, he’s able to
suck all the richness out of
even the finest films: the great
1946 noir Gilda, Alfred H itch
cock’s Rope, Alan Pakula’s
Klute.
Worse still, he ignores the
superior artistry and craft of
those works because he simplis-
tically and (especially in the
case of Klute) incorrectly views
them as anti-gay or misogynist.
He disses David Mamet but
gives credence to the genuinely
crappy 1999 gay indie Rites o f
Passage on the basis of its poorly
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espouse is destructive.” And is American cine-
god Martin Scorsese’s complex, ambiguous
After Hours really nothing more than “an
amusing picture of straight male anxiety”?
1 was actually insulted by the anti-art,
histrionically overpoliticized presumptuousness
of Clum’s book. I’m only relieved that most
queer cinephiles I know aren’t nearly as solip-
sistic and cloistered in their
thinking as he is.
ntertainment reporter James
Robert Parish’s Gus Van
Sant: An Unauthorized Biog
raphy (Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2001) details the life and aes
thetic of a gay filmmaker (and
former Portlander) who lives in
a universe where Clum’s arbi
trarily picky rules simply would
n’t apply.
More Andy Warhol than
Spike Lee, Van Sant— whose
gayest movie is the fine, melan
choly My Oum Private Idaho
and whose best is To Die For—
has never considered himself a role model or
an activist, and his simultaneously anarchic
and shoulder-shrugging attitude toward his sex
uality is cool and liberated.
Parish’s book is frequently disingenuous and
in desperate need of some vigorous copy edit
ing, but it’s hard not to believe that his slightly
yellow Hollywood Babylon-hte style isn’t at least
somewhat intentional. A former entertainment
reporter, a regular celebrity biographer and
himself openly gay, Parish hilariously lets the
reader know just what kind of audience he’s
writing for when, for instance, he refers to a
Van Sant boyfriend as his “special friend.”
Despite slyness verging on cattiness, he does
manage to be respectful and provide a detailed
run-through of the director’s life and each of
his films. He also generally avoids sycophancy
or timidity toward Van Sant’s upper-middle-
class dilettantism and voyeuristic attraction to
drugs, hustling and much younger men.
Whereas “H e’s All M an” offers a clear illus
tration of the difference between a critical
approach based on love of the medium and
one based on love of the self, Parish’s book,
like Mann’s, accomplishes the goal of any good
movie book, be it an in-depth study or a
breathless, breezy bio. W hile reminding us
why we care about the movies, they inspire a
deep desire to revisit films we already know in
a fresh context or, better yet, to explore the
unfamiliar.
in
C hristopher M c Q uain is a Portland free-lance
writer and filmmaker.
Sometimes a
giri just HAS
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