"The Stonewall Film Effect - Gay Geek Theory (Video essay)" Transcript

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Hello everyone, my name is James and welcome to Gay Geek Theory. Today I would like to talk about something that I'm calling the "Stonewall Effect", or maybe the "Stonewall Film Effect".

As someone who has gone to film school, worked in the film industry, and then also gotten a business degree and worked in marketing, I feel like I have a pretty good view of the film industry from, you know, from a distance. A very far distance. Like, surface of the Moon on October 31st distance.

[Text appears on screen: "When the Moon is Furthest From The Earth." "SCIENCE!"]

Hollywood has always had a love-hate relationship with the LGBT community.
Though we may dominate certain sections of the behind-the-scenes world, gay men, drag queens and lesbians were only peppered throughout early cinema. Not really in major roles, but we were visible,
like Marlena Dietrich in Morocco.
This gender-bending bisexual scene turned a lot of heads when the film came out in 1930.

The characters were usually played for laughs, but we were still represented. We were there on the big screen, and you could tell. It wasn't coded or subtle, those characters were gay.
Gay gay gay gay gay.

And really moviegoers didn't seem to mind. Well, most moviegoers anyway.

You see, movies were getting crazy... or at least that's what the religious right thought.
Showing violence, sex, and "questionable" moral behavior were an easy way to get people talking about a movie and then getting their butts in theater seats. But a lot of Catholic and Protestant groups just weren't having it, and through a series of threats (that have had entire books written about them),
they forced the film industry as a whole
to start self-censoring, lest they become chained to the moral hem of those opinionated Christians.

And so the Hays Code was introduced, named after William Hays (doesn't he look like a happy fella), to begin censoring movies.
Violence could no longer be shown without the perpetrator getting his comeuppance somehow (death, jail, and repenting to God were all accepted outcomes.) Nudity was a big no-no, there was no reasoning with them on that front,
and sexuality could only be shown between married or committed couples, again, unless you show those horndogs being punished for their nasty sex in some way. [chuckling] Basically, all the fun was taken out of the movies.

This was when mobster movies started to really take off, because you could show all the violence you wanted, but since the main characters probably died in the end, it was okay! Oh, and homosexuality was outright banned in the beginning. Shocker, I know.

But clever writers and directors figured out ways to get gay characters in the movies again, just in a more coded, veiled way. Even movies as big as Ben-Hur, the 1959 version, written by gay writer Gore Vidal, included some homoerotic subtext. Though it was inserted without the knowledge of lead actor Charlton Heston, who would say it didn't exist until the day he died.

And for the most part, things basically stayed that way until the Hays Code started falling apart in the 1960s. Movies like The Children's Hour, The Producers, and Midnight Cowboy started appearing. Midnight Cowboy even won Best Picture despite its X rating from the MPAA, which it got for a gay blowjob scene.

Then in 1970 came The Boys in the Band, which was the first big Hollywood movie that featured an all gay cast of all gay characters. It was pretty big deal at the time. It would be a pretty big deal today.

We showed up here and there throughout the 1970s and early 80s, but nothing of note. The gay panic kicked in about halfway through the 80s, when AIDS was known as "the gay cancer", and gays became Hollywood's best new villains. We were psychotic, evil, bloodthirsty, a whole group of Jeffrey Dahmers, each and every one of us. Or we were dying of AIDS. So we were either dying or killing. What a great decade the 80s were.

But then Bill Clinton was elected president after twelve long years of Republican rule in the White House, and Hollywood started to ease up on us gays a little bit. Other than Silence of the Lambs (which the gays were not happy about) — I might make a whole other video on that? Suffice to say, we bitched about nothing? — The 1990s gave us some pretty solid gay movies: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, To Wong Foo, Thank You for Everything! Julie Newmar, The Birdcage, Philadelphia, My Own Private Idaho. 1997 alone gave us Wild, Kiss Me, Guido, In & Out, and gay inclusive films like As Good as It Gets, Boogie Nights and The Full Monty. In 1999 we got The Talented Mr. Ripley, Boys Don't Cry, and Cruel Intentions. I know, not exactly happy portrayals of gay characters, but representation nonetheless.

Things were looking up, and with the dawn of the new millennium Queer as Folk became one of the most talked about, and eventually one of the most profitable, TV shows in television history. By the end of its run, Queer as Folk actually had to add an extra 15 minutes onto its hour because so many people wanted to buy commercials. That doesn't even happen now.

Then came... the Bush administration, and gay representation, at least from mainstream Hollywood studios, seemed to dry up. Sure, we got The Hours (which didn't turn a profit) and some independent fare like Mambo Italiano and Monster (again, not exactly a positive portrayal). And I guess you could argue that Chicago is pretty gay? And that Frodo and Sam might have had something going on the down-low? But you'd be reaching.

For the first few years, the closest thing to a gay movie that any major Hollywood studio put out was X-Men 2. Gay director Bryan Singer slathered the mutant-as-gay metaphor all over that movie. But just like The Lord of the Rings and Chicago, it's subtext, and we're looking for plain, simple text here.

[On screen, filling most of the screen]: "2005"

Then along came 2005. I like to think of 2005 as a test case for queer cinema.

First up, Rent, a rock opera about straights, gays and bisexuals living and singing together in AIDS-infested early 90s New York City! Cost 40 million dollars to produce and made... 31 million dollars at the worldwide box office.

Here's some box office info you may not actually know: Theaters take about half of the money that a movie makes, so... a movie needs to make twice as much as its budget in order for the studio to break even, and that's not even counting the cost of advertising the movie. So when you look at it that way, Rent was an even bigger bomb.

Next we have Capote. 7 million dollar production budget with a worldwide box office of just under 50 million. Okay, now we're talking. Nothing to write home about, but at least it turned a profit. Hollywood is a business after all, and they love making money.

Finally we have Brokeback Mountain, a movie people are still angry about not winning Best Picture at the Oscars. This movie is sometimes credited as being the moment a lot of Americans realize that gay people can actually love each other, and it's not just about sex. Made for 14 million dollars, it brought in 178 million dollars at the worldwide box office. Those are the kinds of numbers that Hollywood likes to see.

But here's the thing: looking at 2005 from a business standpoint, Brokeback Mountain is the outlier. Capote did well, yes, but not anywhere beyond what other movies of its ilk were doing at the time or now, meaning Oscar-bait movies. And of course Rent was a total bomb. So Brokeback Mountain was the... was breaking the rule that gay movies don't make money.

So, what would happen? Well, Hollywood would test the gay community.

In 2006, we got Running with Scissors. Based on the best-selling book of the same name, producers were hoping for a big return. Sadly, it was a terribly made movie and it bombed. Producers and executives didn't see a bad movie that lost money though, they saw a gay movie that lost money.

In 2009, Milk won two Oscars, but failed to turn a profit.

So now that we've got some context, let me get to the reason why I call this the "Stonewall Effect", or the "Stonewall Film Effect". The next time Hollywood as a studio system put real faith behind a gay movie was 2015, ten years after Brokeback Mountain.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, the movie did what every historical movie has done and whitewashed the story. It wasn't drag queens, gay, and transgender people of color who started the fight for gay rights, it was a pretty blonde boy from Kansas! Or Nebraska...! One of the flat states!

Because of this, there was a fierce campaign against the movie online. Boycotts were planned, and what Hollywood hoped would turn into the first gay blockbuster turned into a massive tax write-off, making only 187,000 dollars worldwide... Yeah... missin' a few zeroes there guys.

So what is the Stonewall Film Effect? It's when a gay movie fails because of a reason other than being about gay people. Hollywood executives, however, don't see that; they see a gay movie that lost money. They see a gay movie being protested. Gays boycotted Silence of the Lambs in 1991, but it made 272 million dollars.

[mockingly] So it wasn't the boycott that made Stonewall fail, it was because it was about gay people! Audiences obviously don't want gay movies! Maybe a supporting character and a cheap rom-com or chick flick here and there, but no lead roles.

[serious again] You see, every gay movie that fails, fails because it's a gay movie, but every gay movie that succeeds, succeeds for a different reason. Case in point: The Birdcage starred Robin Williams at his prime. Philadelphia starred Tom Hanks and won him an Oscar. Brokeback Mountain had two of the hottest actors in Hollywood, and happened right after George W. Bush started his campaign against gay marriage, so there was a little sympathy. Now I'm not saying these are the reasons that these movies succeeded... but this is what Hollywood executives tell themselves.

So where does that leave us? Well, as a gay man who would actually like to see some major gay characters in movies, I'm at an impasse. From a business standpoint, my view is that we (meaning the LGBT community) should go out and see every movie that features LGBT characters, whether they're gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgender people, see them all. Every one of them, in theaters, and buy the blu-ray, no matter how terrible they are.

"But James, that means Hollywood will just keep making bad gay movies!" Ah, that's the counter-argument. And, you know, if we support movies like Stonewall which whitewash and ciswash history, Hollywood will just keep making movies like that... Fair argument. And history kind of backs you up, to a point.

For decades, African Americans were portrayed in two ways in movies: dangerous criminals, or slaves. That was it. It's like the scary butch dyke, gay best friend, or depressed transgender person stereotypes the LGBT community hates.

But eventually you got the blaxploitation movement in the 1970s, which despite its name sounding kind of negative, actually went a long way in introducing audiences to strong Black characters, Shaft and Foxy Brown for instance. Were they great movies? Not always, sure we look back and cringe at some of them now, but they laid the groundwork for movies to star Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington in the 1990s, and make a lot of money doing it.

And then that laid the groundwork for more "overtly Black" movies like the Madea series in the 2000s and the 2010s, which then laid the groundwork for Black Panther, a 200 million dollar superhero movie with an almost all Black cast taking place in a technologically superior African nation. No Stepin Fetchit's here; our main character, a superhero, is a king.

So where's our gay superhero? They do exist: Marvel's Wiccan and Hulkling, DC's Midnighter and Apollo... so where are they? Well, they remain relegated to the pages of limited yet popular comic book runs because we (meaning the LGBTQ community) haven't shown the Hollywood executives that we're willing to spend our money on gay movies. We need to deal with the bad gay movies like Running with Scissors, Rent, and yes, maybe even Stonewall. Line up around the block to see them, support them, and put our hard-earned dollars into the bloated wallets of Hollywood executives, because when they see bad gay movies succeeding, they'll start buying up those good gay movies whose screenplays get ignored.

In 2016, Moonlight, a gay and Black movie, was made for 1.5 million dollars. People heard it was good, we heard it was good, and we went! It made 65 million dollars worldwide. For a movie about a gay Black man, that's pretty good! I'd say it's exceptional actually, if you look at the box office performance of other movies like that?

So we've got one Oscar winning box office hit on our hands, first time since Brokeback Mountain ten years ago, over 10 years ago... so what are we gonna do now?

This time, are we going to ignore the next LGBT inclusive movie because it wasn't made exactly like we wanted it to be? Or are we going to swallow our here-and-queer pride and support LGBT cinema, even when it's not great. Because remember, it took a lot of slave movies and terrible comedies to get to Black Panther.

So let's show Hollywood we mean business. The next time an LGBT inclusive movie hits a theater near you,

[Each line taking over the screen rapdily as James says it]:

GO!

Take Friends

See It Twice

Even If You
HATE IT

Because:
If It Makes Money

We Might Just Get A
GAY Superhero movie
In The Next Few Years

Or a Stonewall movie that actually tells the truth.

If gays have shown anything, it's that we're good at forcing otherwise slow processes to speed up. Change in Hollywood can make change in Washington look damn near supersonic. Unless there's money involved. You want gay movies? You want lesbian heroes, bisexual leading men, a transgender superhero? Let's put our money where our mouths are and support gay cinema... even the bad ones.

You've gotta start somewhere, and after a century of cinema... we're still at the starting gate.

So what do you guys think? I'd love to hear your opinions on this, so leave them in the comments below, and I will see you in the next video. Thanks for watching, bye.