By Scott Ross
Things, at least in the West, are now so wide open sexually (much too wide for many, what with sex now being optional and/or “assigned at birth” and women being referred to by government entities, officially and with what one presumes is a straight face, as “birthing persons,” but our voices don’t matter in the face of the push for universal Transhumanism) that it would be difficult to explain to someone born after 1981 just how great a cultural thunderclap the appearance in that year of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies was. No one had ever published a book like it before, a serious cultural history on a topic in almost desperate need of addressing, and by a writer as dogged, informed and witty as Russo. For a young gay man besotted with movies but deeply leery of the hostile way they depicted people like me the book was something like, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, profane Holy Writ — the urtext on its subject.
The 1995 documentary by Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk) and Jeffrey Friedman (together they wrote and directed Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt) came much too late for its original author’s full participation; Russo died of AIDS in 1990, the year after he appeared in Common Threads, and if the picture has an almost fatal lack, it’s the loss of Russo’s anger. Too many of the movie’s talking heads are like an older gay friend during the 1980s and ’90s who seemed grateful when there was any representation of homosexual characters in a movie. The viciousness with which most of them were depicted, and which enraged me, scarcely seemed to matter to him — the presence was what counted. Russo addressed the end of the first edition of The Celluloid Closet to exactly that problem, noting that too many of us were complicit in our own oppression, and that the party was over. (I wonder how he would have felt about his old pal Lily Tomlin, who as narrator of the movie pledged to its makers that she would use the occasion to finally come out of the closet herself publicly and then reneged, infuriating Armistead Maupin, one of the writer-participants?) I don’t mean to pillory Epstein and Friedman unduly, but it seems to me that Russo’s unique, angry voice is what is missing from the documentary “based on” his book.
The filmmakers are at their best when presenting pointed film clips, particularly one late in the show featuring a numbing, rapid-fire barrage of bits from then-recent American movies in which those picture’s heroes are seen and heard using the most vile epithets for other characters, with “faggot” (naturally) emerging as the universal favorite. This montage illustrates that, at least as of 1995, very little had changed in the nature of cinematic hatred of homos from the vicious-pansy-hitchhiker bit in Vanishing Point (1971), the hideous slaughter-the-transvestite-killer scene in Freebie and the Bean (1974) and the utterly hysterical gay-bar sequence in the 1962 movie of Advise and Consent, a moment that has no correspondence in the very good Allan Drury novel. Since the evidence suggests Drury was himself a closeted homosexual, that scene almost seems a deliberate slap in his face by the director, Otto Preminger, and the screenwriter, Wendell Mayes. (Although once can imagine Preminger, puffed up with his inviolable self-importance, thinking he was being a crusading, censor-baiting visionary for just showing a queer-bar in an American movie.)
Among the best (or at least, most interesting) clips in the documentary are Eric Campbell’s outrageous feigned-pansy act in Chaplin’s Behind the Screen (1916); Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers expressing their love for each other in Wings (1927); Dietrich in drag and kissing a female patron in Morocco (1930); the singing waiters in the gay bar in Call Her Savage (1932), probably a first in American movies; Garbo kissing her lady-in-waiting in Queen Christina (1933); the “boys-will-be-boys” scene in Wonder Bar (1934); Gloria Holden seducing Nan Grey in the otherwise ho-hum Dracula’s Daughter (1936); Cary Grant “going gay all of a sudden” in Bringing Up Baby (1938); Judith Anderson fondling Rebecca‘s underthings (1940); Peter Lorre sucking on that phallic walking-stick handle in The Maltese Falcon (1941); John Ireland and Montgomery Clift comparing… something… in Red River (1948); the jaw-dropping excerpts from the 1950 women’s prison picture Caged; Doris Day’s exuberant rendition of “Secret Love” in Calamity Jane (1953); Jack Lemmon explaining to Tony Curtis why a guy would want to marry a guy in Some Like It Hot (1959); Peter Finch kissing Murray Head in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971); the wonderful “Screw Maximilian!” dialogue between Michael York and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1972); Antonio Fargas assuring all and sundry that he is “more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get!” in Car Wash (1976); Michael Ontkean making love to Harry Hamlin in the 1982 picture of the same name; and Robert Preston and Leslie Ann Warren exchanging viewpoints in Victor/Victoria (also 1982, the year as well of Deathtrap and Personal Best. And O! how the appearance of four movies, out of hundreds in the theaters, in which gay characters were central shook up the press that year!)
On the debit side: Kirk Douglas telling Lauren Bacall she’s “a sick girl” in Young Man with a Horn (1950); Sal Mineo being gunned down by the cops at the end of Rebel Without a Cause (1955); John Kerr being taught how to “walk like a man” by his roommate, the stick up whose ass seems to have a stick up its ass (thank you, Al Franken) in Tea and Sympathy (1956); the faceless Sebastian Venable being devoured by a mob of angry boys in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Shirley MacLaine breaking down (“I feel so dirty!”) when she finally realizes she really is the Lesbian she’s been accused of being in The Children’s Hour (1961); the utterly ludicrous, wordless “I’ll exercise half-naked with you, and fondle you in the showers, and kiss your hand and even your lips, but I won’t make out with you because that would be faggy” sequence between Brad Davis and Norbert Weisser in Midnight Express (1978)*; and the horrific murder of a gay man who picks up absolutely the wrong trick in Cruising (1980). I think, however, that the filmmakers and their interviewees err in not recognizing, apropos the clips they feature and discuss from the 1968 Frank Sinatra thriller The Detective, how internalized homophobia is itself the chief villain in the movie, that fact intelligently juxtaposed by the screenwriter Abby Mann with Sinatra’s disgust at the vicious attitudes toward gay men of his fellow cops, which he very pointedly calls them on.
farewell to the dying Richard Arlen.
Re-watching The Celluloid Closet almost 30 years after its premiere, it is eminently possible, if you were alive and aware at that time, to feel a genuine pang of nostalgia for the many interviewees who have since joined the majority: Quentin Crisp, Jay Presson Allen, Mart Crowley, Farley Granger, Arthur Laurents, Tony Curtis. Stewart Stern, John Schlesinger, Daniel Melnick and especially Gore Vidal, whose sane, reasoned and invariably witty voice has never been more needed than it is now, in these days of Democrat pro-war agitation and deep affection for the Permanent Government’s inbred totalitarianism.
But here is one Vito unaccountably missed: Charlie Chaplin starting to undress for an (interrupted) assignation with a flirtatious cabin-boy in the 1915 Shanghaied. No one seems to have ever talked about that.
You can see the whole thing here. The moment in question is at 7:25.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
*In his 2020 memoir Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone, who was given an Academy Award for his Midnight Express screenplay, says the fault for that scene properly belongs to Billy Hayes, on whose book the movie was based and who, Stone avers, deliberately kept his sexuality from the filmmakers, only coming out of the closet publicly after the movie had opened. There may be some validity to this. On the other hand, the picture was directed by that congenital liar Alan Parker who, with the singular exception of the 1982 Shoot the Moon (and for which I credit the screenwriter, Bo Goldman) never made an honest movie in his life. This is the man for whom, please remember, in 1980’s Fame there was only a single, sad, lonely gay teenager in the entire New York High School for Performing Arts. And since Hayes claimed that, unlike in the movie, no one in the Turkish prison ever tried to rape him, we may at best take Stone’s words at half face-value.
Post-Script: Here he goes again, Marge
I almost feel, reading over the following, that I should perhaps post it as a separate essay. But since it’s related to the topic, I’ll leave it here.
As if in proof that everything good in the world can be turned into something, if not precisely bad at least deleterious, Vito Russo’s groundbreaking study has (perhaps inevitably?) led in the intervening decades to an entire cottage industry of specious academic “study” under the rubric of something called “queer theory,” which can refract any-and-everything through an increasingly absurd prism using such idiotic non-words as “cis-gendered” and relying heavily on the ability to re-write social history to push a narrow agenda that will nevertheless find favor with a depressingly large swath of unquestioning True Believers.
Thus do we now get such irredeemably demented items as a recent Bfi Film Classics monograph on The Empire Strikes Back in which the author, whom no one outside a tiny cadre of presumably like-minded dolts in Great Britain has ever heard of, subjects one of the most popular and beloved movies of the last 50 years to a mind-boggling series of unhinged hypotheses. Rebecca Harrison identifies herself as “a feminist academic, culture writer and broadcaster [whose] award-winning research [award-winning research?] explores how our everyday lives are shaped by media and technology, and how in turn our encounters with machines [emphasis mine] are informed by experiences of gender, race, sexuality and class. She champions trans-inclusive feminist art and politics through events such as the Glasgow Feminist Arts Festival [I’ll bet that’s a laff-riot] and her work on gender-based violence.” Harrison’s staggeringly wrong-headed and virtually unreadable little book is thus dedicated to “to all trans, non-binary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, of colour, disabled, sex worker, indigenous, survivor, working-class and women [Did I forget anyone?] Star Wars fans…”
In this appalling thing the British Film Institute saw fit to hurl in the faces of the many Star Wars aficionados who had been waiting for it the writer claims, with what to me seems undisguised homophobia, that Darth Vader is gay because he is only interested in Luke, not Leia. Harrison’s other observations on Vader border on, if they do not spill over into, sheer insanity: “Carrying the weight of his queerness and blackness in his dominant stance above the young Jedi, Vader’s famous line is a multifaceted plot twist[…] It is an immaculate conception and a motherless birth; he is a black father, and a queer father, too.” Darth Vader is black. Why? Because James Earl Jones provided his electronically-altered voice. And he’s not just a gay father, but one who lusts after his young son. (That’s what I mean by homophobic.) Nor is the lunacy limited to the author’s main text; Harrison’s very photos captions cause the gorge to rise. Viz: “Luke and Vader clash in a slow-motion sequence of queer time” and “The black-and-queer-coded Darth Vader tries to entice Luke to the Dark Side.” It’s anyone’s guess what queer time is, let alone of the slow-motion variety, but I doubt it will surprise you to learn that the author determines Leia herself is an elitist… and a racist. (Of course she’s an elitist, you unbelievable twit: She’s a fucking princess!) One hopes the Bfi duly received its ESG points from Klaus Schwab for publishing this utterly worthless and certifiably deranged collection of indigestible bilge.
In addition to such spurious inanity passing as movie criticism, we are also told now that Stonewall was not an uprising of (mostly nelly) black, white and Latino men against a system that assumed it would always be able to oppress them but was instead led entirely by transsexuals. Black transsexuals, naturally. Big city “Pride” marches (which I argue have been unnecessary for years now and are pushed along largely by unquestioning complacency and social inertia) routinely exclude as planners and marshals any gay men at all, Caucasian or otherwise, in favor of Lesbian women and “trans,” both groups having marginal numbers among homosexual Americans†; elderly Stonewall veterans are assaulted by “transgender activists”; and I am lectured by know-nothing pipsqueaks that I, as a privileged white gay man, am the problem, that I am “hindering our progress as a queer community,” and that I damn well better step aside and if I do not have the good grace to die, to at least get myself buried somewhere. Inclusion for all! (Except you, white man.)
Well, if you will forgive the paraphrasing of Dylan Thomas — at least I know where it comes from — this old white gay man has no intention of going quietly into that good night of official erasure by a subset of psychologically damaged young people who are demonstrably incapable of rational thought or reason, whose parents were not even alive when the gay rights movement began and who, if Vito Russo was still was us, would no doubt label him a racist transphobe and demand he be removed from sight.
I realize that in the world as it is currently constituted opposition to both neoliberal warmongering and censorship and the bizarre, essentially reactionary, excesses of the alleged “left” is now considered irredeemably right-wing, much as belief in something we used to call freedom of speech is Trump (or is that Putin?)-directed. I also acknowledge that self-justification and personal explanation are a form of weakness; but if someone as socially and politically radical as yours truly is this annoyed and appalled by what’s going on, then what do you think is being engendered — a word very carefully chosen for this context — in the hearts and minds of those less enlightened? The backlash by the majority against mindless, sneering, reactive, me-me-me “Woke” activism is coming, folks. It is not going to be pretty.
†Lesbians comprise only 16% of the self-identified gay population. Transsexuals make up less than 1% of the world’s population, and their showing in the so-called “LGBTQ+” demographic is equally miniscule. Further, the evidence suggests most supposed “trans kids” are in fact gay and, if left alone to develop would likely come to terms with their homosexuality in time instead of feeling peer-pressured to presume they are girls-in-boy’s-bodies or boys-in-girl’s-bodies. But since until comparatively recently when “trans” activists figured out a way to highjack the gay-rights movement the transsexual population did not wish to be identified with us fags, I say zei gezunt.
So few critics, so many poets 