"When Hollywood Came Out of the Closet" Transcript

The Children's Hour is not about lesbianism, it's about the power of lies to destroy people's lives.

-William Wyler, 1962

The Sergeant is not about homosexuality, it's about loneliness.

-Rod Steiger, 1968

Windows is not about homosexuality, it's about insanity.

-Gordon Willis, 1979

On the strength of a classy set of New York stage reviews and its billing as a comedy despite its dead serious intent, The Boys in the Band was taken for gospel in an America populated by people who had never met a live homosexual in their entire lives. The film presented a perfunctory compendium of easily acceptable stereotypes who gather at a Manhattan birthday party and spend an evening savaging each other and their way of life. The "landslide of truths" consisted ultimately of some jumbled Freudian stabs at overly protective mothers and absent fathers and lots of zippy fag humor that posed as philosophy. Yet in spite of itself, Crowley's passion play was part catharsis and part catalyst. His characters were losers or borderline survivors at best, but they paved the way for winners.

Although it was difficult to see this clearly in 1970, The Boys in the Band presented some attractive and functional gay men who formed an implicit challenge to the stereotypes exploited in Emory (Cliff Gorman) and Harold (Leonard Frey). The film was not positive, but it was fair. The heterosexual Alan (Peter White) can easily despise the nellie Emory because he is everything a faggot is supposed to be, a "butterfly in heat." Alan even comes to pity the battered sissy in the end. But what scares Alan and the audience, what they could not come to terms with or understand, is the homosexuality of Hank and Larry (Laurence Luckinbill and Keith Prentice), who are both just as queer as Emory yet "look" as straight as Alan. The possibility that there could be nonstereotypical homosexuals who are also staunch advocates of a working gay relationship is presented by the two lovers throughout the film. And they are the two characters most often ignored by critics and analysts of the film. It is Larry who speaks of rejecting heterosexual concepts of marriage and creating a relationship with "respect for one another's freedom, with no need to lie or pretend." At the end of the film, Larry and Hank win the telephone truth game, that Michael (Kenneth Nelson) has viciously devised, when they call each other and say [...]

"I love you."

It is when Larry and Hank express affection for each other physically and verbally that the audience and the lone straight party guest are most uncomfortable.

In contrast, Michael's inability to deal with his own homosexuality is exposed as old-time movie melodrama, and Harold's final, equally melodramatic speech puts it in perspective.

You are a sad and pathetic man, Michael. You are a homosexual, and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it. Not all your prayers to your God. Not all the analysis your money can buy in the years you have left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life. If you want it desperately enough. If you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you will always be homosexual as well, Michael. Always. Until the day you die.

The speech captured the essence of self-hatred and summed up a generation of gay men who were taught to blame all their troubles on their homosexuality. In the end, Michael's self-hatred and his inability to function became as antiquated as Harold's keeping his marijuana in a Band-Aid box in the medicine chest so that he can flush it down the john if the police should arrive. Michael's crying jags and old-movie fantasies shed light not on his homosexuality but on the falsehoods and illusions of Hollywood dreams, the dreams that had taught homosexuals that there were no homosexuals in polite society.

TCC p.176-177

When Clive Barnes called The Boys in the Band a homosexual play, he was right. It was a homosexual period piece just as Green Pastures was a Negro period piece. But blacks are visible and gays are not, and Hollywood was not moved to change a whit by all this hysteria in the gay drawing rooms of Manhattan. Yet Boys moved homosexuals throughout the country. The internalized guilt and self-hatred of eight gay men at a Manhattan birthday party formed the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form. It supplied concrete and personalized examples of the negative effects of what homosexuals learn about themselves from the distortions of the media. And the film caused the first public reaction by a burgeoning gay rights movement to the accepted stereotypes in Crowley's play.

Protests by gays did not dispute the existence of such stereotypes, but they were quick to point out that the view was one-sided and that the exclusive depiction or representation of any group of people by a minority stereotype is called bigotry. The Boys in the Band was a play about homosexuals and a homosexual play. It was a work that sprang from the subculture itself and represented bitter reflection. Society treated it as though it were a scientific expedition, but in fact it was an inner journey for countless gays who snapped to attention when confronted with the pathos of Michael's sickening routines. Many of the stereotypes put forth by Crowley were myths that gays had accepted and even fit themselves into because there appeared to be no alternative. At the beginning of the 1960s, two British films about the life of Oscar Wilde could not even be shown in the United States because the Code had not yet been revised. The audience for The Boys in the Band included gay people who had grown up thinking that they were the only homosexuals in the world. The film explored passing and not being able to pass, loving and not being able to love, and above all else, surviving in a world that denied one's very existence. But it did so before an American public that was at the stage of barely being able to mention homosexuality at all. It was a gay movie for gay people, and it immediately became both a period piece and a reconfirmation of the stereotypes.

Only twice, both times incidentally, has a serious American film dealt with homosexuality as a family issue or even suggested that homosexuals might be someone's children. In Gilbert Cates' Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and in Robert Mulligan's Bloodbrothers, the alienation of gay children from their parents provides vignettes that ring true but lack focus in their own contexts. In Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), the homosexuality of Joanne Woodward's son (Ron Rickards) is seen only in terms of how the revelation affects her present mid-life crisis, as one more token of her failure as a wife and mother. In the end, she comes to terms with it. Her son, who does not commit suicide or go insane, moves to Amsterdam with a lover and refuses to see his parents until they can deal with him as he is. He turns their inability to see him as a whole person into their problem, a family matter, not his problem.

In 1973, one American gay liberation love story was expected to rival Gone With the Wind in scope and popularity and solve the problem of oppression in the bargain; its failure left its director, a pioneer, bitter and disillusioned. Christopher Larkin's A Very Natural Thing, the first film on a gay liberation theme intended for commercial distribution, attempted to deal with some of the issues raised by Rosa von Praunheim. In his introduction to the film, printed in the program handout, Larkin described its genesis.

Originally titled For as Long as Possible, the film examined the options available to gay couples on society's terms and asked a question that ultimately could have only Praunheim's Marxist answer. How do two men who will not play society's game define a relationship that is not based on roles? A Very Natural Thing attempts to leave behind marriage, fidelity and monogamy and instead reinforces them. While the film came about as a result of the impact of the gay movement on Larkin and his co-author Joe Coencas, it was dismissed as trivial soap opera by the establishment press and generally savaged by gay liberationists for its romantic illusions and a lack of radical conviction.

David (Robert Joel), an ex-seminarian, teaches school in New York City and settles into a monogamous relationship with Mark (Curt Gareth), a straight-identified insurance salesman. Their meeting, courtship, marriage and breakup are examined in the first half of the film. As documented by Larkin, their romance is a long and deliberate Love Story parody in which the two go to the opera, roll in the autumn leaves in Central Park, watch each other shave in the morning and ape every heterosexual movie cliché about love and marriage. Mark's refusal to be possessed and David's nagging insecurities end the relationship.

In the second half of the film, David explores the alternatives. Promiscuous sex at bathhouses and orgies on Fire Island are as unsatisfying to him as his pervasive loneliness. In a sequence filmed at the 1973 gay pride rally in New York's Washington Square Park, David meets Jason (Bo White), a divorced photographer who helps him to begin to redefine his perceptions of the nature of gay relationships. After establishing that there should be no promises, no expectations, only a commitment to explore each other, the film ends with the two running naked in the surf at Cape Cod, a slow-motion sequence that bore the brunt of the outrage and criticism directed at the film. Freedom from the assumption of roles in an unstructured relationship is difficult to express on film in a lyric way without attracting brickbats, but Larkin knew this, and he consciously chose to see romance as the bottom line.

Too many people, both straight and gay, see gay relationships as sad, necessarily transient sadomasochistic parodies of heterosexual marriages which cause nothing but unhappiness to the parties involved. This is simply not true. I wanted to say that same-sex relationships are no more problematic but no easier than any other human relationships. They are in many ways the same and in several ways different from heterosexual relation- ships but in themselves are no less possible or worthwhile.

Consequently, because of Larkin's insistence on couching his message in such relentlessly romantic terms, the film infuriated the very people who were fighting for such a redefinition on the political front.

Neither porno nor commercially oriented, A Very Natural Thing had such massive advertising and distribution problems that it made little impact, though it is still screened regularly, in series on homosexuality in film, as a breakthrough movie. The New York Post called it "an argument rather than an entertainment"; Judith Crist wrote, "If the gay lib movement wants its own mediocre movie preachment - here it is."

John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) was a poignant, understanding and interesting story, but it did not sell to a mass audience. It has consistently been cited since as an example of a "good gay film" that failed to make it at the box office, "proof" that homosexuality is not a money-making proposition in movie terms. The problem, however, was in the packaging. Sunday, Bloody Sunday was a talky, introspective British production that was in no way an American mass audience picture. In fact there seems to be very little room in the American market anymore for the "small but interesting" film. According to producers and writers, this is now the specialty of movies made for television. Every theatrical film has to be a Grease or a Star Wars because the studios will now make only two or three films a year instead of ten, and each one has to be a smash hit. Americans who saw it seemed not to understand Sunday, Bloody Sunday, though they took their cue from the highbrow critics and respected it. Others, unable to figure out what it was "about" in spite of the glowing notices, stayed away in droves.

"This film," Schlesinger said, "is not about the sexuality of these people." The people in question were a homosexual doctor (Peter Finch), a heterosexual career woman (Glenda Jackson) and the bisexual artist (Murray Head) with whom they were both in love. And Schlesinger was right; Sunday, Bloody Sunday was not about sexuality. But it was a film in which alternative sexuality was taken for granted, something that gay activists had been asking for all along. It was a film about human relationships and how they do not always match our ideas about what love ought to be. Everyone in the film settles for something less than he or she had hoped for or been taught to expect - except the bisexual, whose sexuality is viewed as part of his youthful noncommitment to anyone or anything but his work. When Head runs off to America at the end of the film, leaving Jackson and Finch to fend for themselves, it is clear that their lives will continue though they are trapped in resignation. In the end, they realize, one is always alone.

The film presented a happy ending for a homosexual character whose dull resignation is not the product of his gayness. Finch tells the audience in a closing monologue, "People say to me, He never made you happy. And I say, But I am happy. Apart from missing him. All my life I've been looking for someone courageous and resourceful. He's not it. But something. We were something." The speech has little to do with homosexuality, but it does say that gay relationships are not nothing. And Sunday, Bloody Sunday said some- thing even more universal and important, that "the whole thing" that Jackson's mother spoke of is an illusion. Like the cold, metallic connections made by the telephone equipment at the beginning of the film, people connect randomly, hoping that their system of relating will not break down before they can connect and find a way to make it work together.

America hated Sunday, Bloody Sunday. One kiss exchanged between Head and Finch caused even more of a stir than scenes that showed them in bed together. Male-male relationships are defined in terms of sex, yet in many minds affectionate love between men is out of the question. And this was the first affectionate kiss onscreen between two men that was not a device or a shock mechanism. It drew gasps from audiences wherever it played, and because of it many theaters would not book the film at all. The London press quoted singer Shirley Bassey, a friend of Peter Finch, as complaining that at a screening the kiss had made her sick to her stomach, forcing her to leave the theater. The flood of gay films that followed The Boys in the Band into release in 1970 revealed many similar instances of latent homophobia among actors, writers, directors and critics.

In June 1973, Variety reported the first in a series of meetings between gay activists and representatives of the film and television industries to "discuss the treatment of homosexual figures and homosexuality in U.S.-made theatrical and television films." The Gay Activists Alliance had requested the meeting with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers to protest "false and derogatory depictions of lesbians and gay men" and to suggest that there were ways "to put the pros and the cons of the gay lifestyle on film with no loss of audience appeal or consequent revenue." In the summer of 1973, the Gay Activists Alliance, in cooperation with the National Gay Task Force, released a set of guidelines.

Some General Principles for Motion Picture and Television Treatment of Homosexuality

1. Homosexuality isn't funny. Sometimes anything can be a source of humor, but the lives of twenty million Americans are not a joke.
2. Fag, faggot, dyke, queer, lezzie, homo, fairy, mary, pansy, sissy, etc. are terms of abuse. If you don't want to insult, the words are gay, lesbian and homosexual. That doesn't mean that nobody on film can use a dirty word, but if you have rules about kike, wop, spic, nigger, etc., use them for fag and dyke.
3. Use the same rules you have for other minorities. If bigots don't get away with it if they hate Catholics, they can't get away with it if they hate gays. Put another way, the rights and dignity of homosexuals are not a controversial issue.
4. Stereotypical people do exist. But if such a minority of any group receives exclusive media exposure, that's bigotry. Until a broad spectrum of the gay community is expressed on film and the stereotypes are put into perspective, their use is damaging.
5. Homosexuality is a natural variant of human sexuality. It is not an illness, nor is it a problem for the majority of gays who are happy to be what they are. If all blacks or Jews or Irish or Chicanos were portrayed as anguished, oddball or insane, they'd be angry too. Gays are angry.
6. If you are doing a drama or a comedy or a talk show about homosexuality, you have an obligation to do your homework and free yourself from the myths.
7. There is a wide variety of available themes concerning the place of homosexuality in contemporary society and the range of gay relationships and lifestyles. Many of these can provide entertainment for a broad, general public. Gays do not want to return to media invisibility.
8. A permanent board of consultants consisting of gay men and women is available to the industry. But there are gay people all around you in your jobs. It is up to you to provide a climate in which they feel free to speak out openly.

Television, which is subject to regulation by the Federal Communications Commission and to the reactions of its advertisers to vocal public opinion, was more vulnerable to this type of activist pressure than was the motion picture industry. Television programming, scheduled for nearly twenty-four hours a day, was in constant need of social issues with which to deal, homosexuality among them. A film may have to be a hit, but when a television show flops, there is always next week and another subject, so experimentation was encouraged. Pressure by gay liberation directed the course that television would take regarding the presentation of homosexuality for the American viewer, and it succeeded in obtaining a more balanced and certainly more prolific dialogue on television than in film.

In 1972, Norman Lear's lovable bigot Archie Bunker encountered homosexuality for the first time when he discovered that one of his drinking pals, a former football player, was gay. [...]

President Richard Nixon watched the episode at the White House and pronounced it "distasteful" because "it made a good man look like a fool." It was not clear whether the president referred to the shocked Archie Bunker or the football player.

In that same year, ABC took the first important step in the portrayal of average gays on television. A two-hour movie of the week called That Certain Summer told the story of a divorced man (Hal Holbrook) who decides to tell his fourteen-year-old son (Scott Jacoby) that he is gay when the boy comes for a weekend visit. The son is hostile to the presence of his father's lover (Martin Sheen), and when Holbrook finally gets around to explaining the situation to him, the boy runs away, unable to deal with it. The story was a trifle mild for gay liberationists; while it received rave reviews in the straight press, some gay writers condemned it for being too tentative and overly cautious. The impetus for the idea, according to the screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link, came from "the fact that a homosexual friend of ours mentioned that his son was coming to visit him. We knew he had been married, but we didn't know he had children, and it struck us as an exciting idea for a story."

Nothing more about homosexuality appeared on the home screen until That Certain Summer five years later, but with that the barriers seemed to be lifted. By the mid 1970s, lesbian or gay male characters, often in the context of issues first raised by the gay liberation movement, had appeared on virtually every situation comedy, drama and talk show in prime time television. All in the Family, Rhoda, Maude, Barney Miller, MASH*, Baretta, Kojak, Phyllis, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, The Bob Crane Show, Carter Country, The Bob Newhart Show, Family, Medical Center and scores of others featured gay characters, and most continue to do so. Gay life in America has been the subject of local and national documentary shows each year, and television movies such as Sergeant Matlovitch Versus the U.S. Air Force and A Question of Love were based on the real-life struggles of gay men and lesbians.

In 1976, as part of its Bicentennial salute to great Americans, CBS aired a dramatization of the life of Walt Whitman that starred Rip Torn as our nation's poet laureate and Brad Davis as his lover Peter Doyle. Thus a poet whose masculine pronouns were often changed to feminine ones by people who tried to suppress the evidence of his homosexuality was presented as a gay man on national television. Two stunning television dramas, The Naked Civil Servant and The War Widow, were positive evocations of the lives of gay characters, real and fictional. Both shows infused their central characters with a sense of history and of their role in that history as strugglers for sexual freedom. Both shows uncovered with romance and humor a hidden part of the gay experience.

Although Quentin Crisp's story, The Naked Civil Servant (1977), was not the dream of a gay liberationist, gays admired and respected Crisp's defiant lifestyle enormously. Crisp makes public hay of the fact that he is not a gay militant, but he may in fact have been one of the first gay activists in his own passive way. A man who dyed his hair, wore eye makeup and painted his lips and nails, a man who refused to deny his homosexuality, Crisp was a revolutionary soon after the turn of the century. In revealing his life and opinions in print and on film, he is himself an implicit challenge to the myth; the stereotype speaks. The Naked Civil Servant said that flamboyant, overt homosexuality was heroic and the struggle to remain different in a conformist world was admirable.

Yet not one gay hero emerged on the movie screen. In the 1970s, heroes who were gay in original source material were made heterosexual for the screen-just as their counterparts had been altered in the 1940s and 1950s. Gay fiction is now big business, but not one lesbian or gay literary hero has been successfully transferred to the screen. Film projects based on the life of gay tennis pro Bill Tilden and on James Kirkwood's novel Good Times/Bad Times, announced repeatedly in the trade press, have not materialized. Accord- ing to Andrew Sarris, the Tilden project was dropped because of "nervousness about its unsavory nature." The producer Ray Agayhan tried for three years to get a film version of Laura Z. Hobson's Consenting Adult off the ground in Hollywood. The story of a mother who must come to terms with her son's homosexuality, "it was turned down by all the major studios with enormous promptness," according to the author. Hobson could sell Hollywood Jews in 1947 with her Gentleman's Agreement, but she could not sell Hollywood gays in 1979. "They're scared to death of this one," she said.

William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) was based on a 1970 novel by a New York Times editor, Gerald Walker, that portrayed the process by which a New York City policeman, assigned to capture a psychotic killer of gay men, becomes aware of his own homosexuality and commences murdering gays. The novel, while exploiting the socially instilled self-hatred of an unstable character, is homophobic in spirit and in fact; it sees all its gay characters as having been "recruited," condemned to the sad gay life like modern vampires who must create new victims in order to survive. The gay characters in the novel are all filled with self-hatred and a hatred for the people who "turned" them gay (the blame usually falls on the first man with whom they had sex). Walker's killer intimates that the homosexual lifestyle is an inherently violent one- not that the cruising scene is violent, but that to be homosexual is to be violent.

The killer in Friedkin's Cruising knifes his victims to death during or immediately following sex, and the film opens with a shot of a gangrenous severed arm floating in the Hudson River. The late-night sex scene in the after-hours clubs becomes, in Cruising, the only game in town for gays. Al Pacino, who plays the cop, immerses himself in the sex-obsessed underground of heavy leather and sadomasochism. As the film wears on, he becomes agitated and restless, a state brought about by his own sexual identity crisis, though his motives are never explored or explained. When he finally locates the killer, he stabs him, which puts the killer in the hospital under police custody. Pacino's assignment is over. However, there follows the murder of Pacino's gay next- door neighbor (Don Scardino), who was the only relatively happy gay in the film. It is implied that Pacino himself has committed this final murder, and the film ends with him gazing in a mirror.

In a statement to the press, the director-screenwriter Friedkin said that he was not sure who the real murderer was and that, furthermore, he did not consider the murderer to be homosexual. A more likely conclusion is that Friedkin deliberately obscured the identity of Scardino's killer in conscious or unconscious response to the wave of protest that arose in the summer of 1979, when he began shooting. Gays who protested the making of the film maintained that it would show that when Pacino recognized his attraction to the homosexual world, he would become psychotic and begin to kill. So Friedkin avoided that situation by leaving the ending of the film ambiguous.

Yet Friedkin realized that his film said what gay activists claimed it said, and he added a disclaimer to all prints of the film.

This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.

The disclaimer is an admission of guilt. What director would make such a statement if he truly believed that his film would not be taken to be representative of the whole? Protest leaflets against Cruising said, "People will die because of this film." In November 1980, outside the Ramrod Bar, the site of the filming of Cruising, a minister's son emerged from a car with an Israeli submachine gun and killed two gay men.

The producers of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle say that if necessary, they will make the film for under a million dollars with independent financing- even if they have to go screaming and kicking through the Eighties with the project. That could be a long and tedious process. Yet the most insightful and important films - gay films, not simply films about gays - are those which have been made in struggle, by small groups of people and against tremendous odds.

Ron Peck and Paul Hallam, the director and producer of the British film Nighthawks (1978), spent five years in planning and raising money for their film about a gay teacher (Ken Robertson) who spends his nights cruising in bars and discos and having one-night stands. Nighthawks provides an almost documentary look at the nighttime scene and the ritualistic life of one man who is beginning to realize that he leads two separate lives. In the climax of the film, the students in his geography class ask him if he is "queer," and he tells them he is gay. The dispassionate view of London gay nightlife allows a gay male audience to experience the hunt as more than a passive spectator. There is an uncanny feeling that each member of the audience is himself cruising, recognizing a look, a gesture, a glance, then realizing it is meant for the character in the film, through whose eyes we are looking. No slick and sensational Hollywood peep show, Nighthawks is a good, perceptive film with modest intentions, and it succeeds without compromising its scope for commercial reasons.

While William Friedkin was on New York's streets filming the blood-and-guts Hollywood version of the gay underground, Nighthawks opened in New York and got what turned out to be better reviews than Cruising would get six months later. Several mainstream critics, including Janet Maslin in the New York Times and David Denby in New York magazine, singled out Nighthawks as a film that managed to examine gay nightlife with sensitivity, intelligence and a respect for its main character. In his program note on the film, director Ron Peck wrote, "The film only shows one part of the gay scene it does not cover everything as many people may wish it did. But such a hope or expectation is only a reflection of the dire situation in which there are so few films with or about gay characters. Almost any film starts off with the burden of trying to redress an imbalance, to make homosexuality visible in the cinema. We need hundreds of gay films, not half a dozen." Peck's film, though praised by critics in several countries, was denied approval for showing in Greece in April 1980.