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2006 |
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LIGHT ON HIS FEET
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Gay characters finally
get real attention in films
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Two of the five films nominated for Best Picture Oscars at Sunday night's Academy Awards show--"Brokeback Mountain" and "Capote"--have leading characters who are gay. I don't mean they're just "sensitive" either. I mean they're homosexuals.
That's not all. The three male actors who play those gay leads--Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffmand and Jake Gyllenhaal--are considered major contenders for Oscars and Felicity Huffman, who plays a man who's becoming a woman in "Transamerica" may have a good shot at Best Actress.
If you're Jerry Falwell, I'm sure you think that's another sure sign Armageddon is just around the corner. On the other hand, if you're Elton John, you probably are thinking Hollywood is finally starting to grow up a little.
"Brokeback Mountain," in particular, has been an eye-opener for the whole movie industry. It's a tragic love story between two men. Not guys who skip to work either. These are he-men cowboys. On paper, that's box office poison. Who's going to go see a movie where hunky guys kiss each other and rummage around in each other's sleeping bags?
Well, kazillions of people seem to want to see it. It is a box office success--not a blockbuster, mind you, but a genuine success. Stranger yet, it's a "date movie." Girls are dragging their boy friends to see it. Girls cry in it. And I'll admit I got a few tears in my eyes when Heath Ledger finally visited the home of his male lover, met his parents and sat alone in their son's boyhood room.
Let's face it, folks. There has been a major sea change in America. A new generation is growing up with much more relaxed ideas about gays and lesbians. These younger people will respond to a good movie that tells a truly engrossing love story, even if the lovers are of the same gender. If they like the people, the gay part, if handled tactfully, doesn't revolt them.
This is a big change. Think of the daring films about gay life made in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s--Stanley Donen's "Staircase" (1969) with Richard Burton and Rex Harrison as lovers; Mark Rydell's "The Fox" (1968) with, of all people, Keir Dullea coming between lesbian lovers Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood; Robert Aldrich's "The Killing of Sister George" (1968) with that memorable scene of Coral Browne hovering over Susannah York's bare breasts, looking as hungry as a homeless kid at a free buffet. Those films either lost money or were really marginal at the box office, despite the heavyweight directors and stars.
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made this gayi-themed drama with Peter Finch, left, and Glenda Jackson, right, fighting over Murray Head, who went both ways. Moviegoers went just one way--away from the theater. |
In 1971, gay director John Schlesinger made "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in which Oscar winner Glenda Jackson and future Oscar winner Peter Finch both wer vying for the affections of a switch-hitting young man played by Murray Head. (The Hollywood joke on that one is that they both just "wanted some Head.") That film also tanked at the box office.
Personally, I think mainstream Hollywood finally lost interest in doing gay love stories after Arthur Hiller, the director of the ultra-romantic 10-hanky tragic romance movie "Love Story" followed that up with "Making Love" in 1982, bringing Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin together to do the lovemaking while stunned Kate Jackson stood on the sidelines, wondering what she was doing wrong. The few people who went to see that movie probably thought they were going to something else.
Since the 1980s, television has been the medium to really put over the notion that it's all right to have movies about gay people. And I don't really mean the many "daring" TV shows that put in gay kisses here and there during ratings sweeps. I mean the daytime talk shows that started to have a steady stream of gay people coming on to talk about their lifestyle. I mean, if Oprah likes them, can they be that bad?
Ellen Degeneres' long coming out party on network television certainly had its impact on the TV Nation. Ellen is just plain loveable. So, she likes girls. Big deal. All those people who campaigned against her "Ellen" sitcom and its embracing of gay life have been strangely quiet since she became a popular talk show host.
By the late 1990s, I believe enough minds had changed about homosexuality that it began to seem a lot less abnormal than it had in the past. The time was ripe for movies about them again. Remember Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry"? She played a real person--a gay woman who dressed as a man--and audiences cheered her to her first Best Actress Oscar.
Like both the gay-related Best Picture nominees this year, "Boys Don't Cry" did not come from the big studios. It came from the increasingly strong independent film movement in Hollywood--a movement so strong that the majors are either buying up the indies or making distribution deals with them. If the trend continues, the majors finally will start doing the edgy sort of films that treat issues like homosexuality.
But it will take a few more "Brokeback Mountain" box office successes to really get the ball rolling.
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the classic mystery thriller "Laura." |
Still, think about what a long way Hollywood has come from the old days. In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock did what he could to make us understand that Mrs. Danvers, the creepy housekeeper played by Judith Anderson in "Rebecca," had a lesbian fixation on her former mistress--and still got a thrill from running her hands over the silky items in Rebecca's underwear drawer. But you couldn't identify a character as gay in 1940. And you still couldn't in 1951 when Hitch "sissied up" Robert Walker in "Strangers On A Train," but couldn't come right out and let us know that Walker's character, Bruno, really wanted to get it on with Farley Granger.
I still remember the amazing awkwardness of MGM's "Tea and Sympathy" in 1956, the year I was graduated from high school. John Kerr was an obviously homosexual lad in a boys' school, but not even the source material, the Broadway play by Robert Anderson, could say right out that he was gay. Instead, they minced all around the topic and talked of his "sensitivity." Ultimately, nice Deborah Kerr decided to make the supreme sacrifice and divert him from a life of gayness by letting him have sex with her.
"Years from now, when you talk of this--and you will--please be kind," she told the boy as she opened herself to him.
Even then, when I was only 17 and sexually deprived, I knew that wasn't going to work. In fact, I had this notion that having sex with icy Deborah Kerr might turn a straight guy into a homosexual. As I recall, all Burt Lancaster got was goosebumps when he rolled around in the surf with her in "From Here To Eternity." He should have rolled around in the surf with his male co-star, Montgomery Clift, who was a rather flamboyant homosexual in real life.
In fact, I believe the only time I ever saw anything remotely resembling a real gay scene in a movie during my youth was when I saw Roberto Rossellini's 1945 "Open City" in the early 1950s and was surprised to find two Italian women making love in a brief sequence. In those days, if you wanted to see real sex or nudity, it was likely to be in either an Italian or a French movie.
If you look even further back--to the 1930s, for example--you will find lots of gay characters, but they're almost always portrayed as male "sissies." If you want a vivid demonstration, rent "Top Hat" with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, then look for Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore. That swishing sound isn't Astaire dancing on sand. Those two guys pranced and minced their way through many fussy years as undercover gay characters. The notion then was to put an effiminate man in a small role, playing a likeable character, and gay people would read the secret code signs and feel satisfied. Meanwhile, straight people would just think those guys were funny.
Or look at Clifton Webb before he became "family film" gold with "Sitting Pretty" and his other Mr. Belvedere or "Cheaper by the Dozen" films. Look at him in the 1944 "Laura" and you'll see a thinly-disguised gay character, the fussily-charming guy who can be real nasty if you rub him the wrong way.
For that matter, now that EVERYBODY knows that Rock Hudson was gay, go back and look at those Ross Hunter comedies he made with Doris Day. See how many gay in-jokes you can find. See how many times poor Rock wound up having to wear some of Doris' clothes. I haven't found any undercover gay characters in George Stevens' "Giant" (1956), but it now seems quaintly charming to realize Elizabeth Taylor was sandwiched between two gay leading men--Rock Hudson and James Dean--with gay Sal Mineo in the background.
As much fun as it is to go back and look for secret gay characters, I think we're much better off today now that films are beginning to finally depict gay characters as we know them in real life, being regular people almost all the time except when they go to bed.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
The "Oscar" logo and the phrase "Academy Awards"
are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts & Sciences. This column first posted Feb. 27, 2006.
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