Last year marked the 125th anniversary of The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Produced for Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope viewer in 1894, this title won't be familiar to many. But it shows two men dancing to a tune played by a violinist and has been claimed as the first gay film in screen history. In the first of a two-part survey, Cinema Paradiso looks back at what happened next.
First Inklings
Although it was only seen by those who frequented the peepshow parlours that had started springing up in some of America's biggest cities, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson's 20-second snippet caused something of a sensation, as it subverted the tenets of conventional male behaviour. Yet, it appeared to be an isolated incident, as moving picture producers sought to pander to polite middle-class audiences who could afford to pay higher prices for their tickets. There were occasional nudges and winks, such as the effete dandy in Alice Guy-Blaché's Algie, the Miner (1912) and the case of mistaken cross-dressing identity in Charlie Chaplin's Behind the Screen (1916). But, as can be seen from the clips from these films in Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's excellent documentary, The Celluloid Closet (1995), film-makers were only prepared to tease rather than treat LGBTQ+ themes with any degree of seriousness.
Based on a book by gay activist and film historian Vito Russo, who is profiled in Jeffrey Schwartz's Vito (2011), The Celluloid Closet also includes extracts from The Soilers (1923) and The Broadway Melody (1929) among others, which show how camp characters were used for comic relief. Even Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy toyed with the nature of their relationship in the following exchange from Their First Mistake (1932), which can be found on the same disc as Pack Up Your Troubles: Oliver: She says I think more of you than I do of her. Stanley: Well you do, don't you? Oliver: Well, we won't go into that...
In addition to the ground-breaking kiss between Richard Arlen and Charles 'Buddy' Rogers in William Wellman's Oscar-winning Great War picture, Wings (1927), The Celluloid Closet also shows the first Hollywood excursion to a gay bar in John Francis Dillon's Call Her Savage (1932), which featured character actor Tyrell Davis, who also put in an equally camp appearance in George Cukor's Our Betters (1933). Like Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn, Davis frequently played 'sissy' or 'pansy' characters, whose impeccable dress, precise mannerisms and affected diction tipped off audiences about their sexual inclinations. Alongside Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore, Horton was a frequent co-star of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in confections like Mark Sandrich's The Gay Divorcee (1934), while Pangborn was a screwball specialist and a favourite of directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges. Try searching the Cinema Paradiso website to see the many classic pictures that Horton and Pangborn graced.
Bypassing the Code
Despite providing the gay community with a modicum of representation, not everyone approved of these depictions. The naysayers were even more aghast at the coded gay villains in Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls, Victor Halpern's White Zombie (both 1932) and the 1931 (Roy Del Ruth) and 1941 (John Huston) versions of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in which Dwight Frye and Peter Lorre respectively made little attempt to disguise Joel Cairo's homosexuality. Lorre's fey delivery typified the way in which straight actors approached gay characters and David Thorpe provides a fascinating insight into how speech denotes personality in the 2014 documentary, Do I Sound Gay? This wasn't the only Humphrey Bogart classic with a gay subtext, however, as some critics have highlighted the 'beautiful friendship' between Rick (Bogart) and Louis Renault (Claude Rains) in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942).
Although they were not allowed to live openly, many key figures in Golden Age Hollywood were gay, including costume designers Orry-Kelly and Adrian, set decorators Jack Moore and Henry Grace, and choreographers Charles Walters and Jack Cole. As Scotty Bowers reveals in Matt Tyrnauer's documentary, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (2017), numerous actors and actresses were gay or bisexual, among them Ramon Novarro, William Haines, Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, who famously joked at having gone 'gay all of a sudden' in Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) before casting admiring glances at Randolph Scott in Garson Kanin's My Favourite Wife (1940), the significance of which was not lost on insiders who knew that the pair were more than mere roommates at digs nicknamed 'Bachelor Hall'.
A clutch of producers and directors also lived double lives, including David Lewis, Ross Hunter, Edmund Goulding, Irving Rapper, Arthur Lubin, Mitchell Leisen, George Cukor and James Whale. The latter often used horror films like Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933) to examine gay themes and his experiences are relived by the Oscar-nominated Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters (1998), which earned writer-director Bill Condon the Best Adapted Screenplay award. The rest frequently made so-called 'woman's pictures' with the likes of Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner, who were treasured for their on-screen sufferings and the fact that (like so many LGBTQ+ people), they always seemed to be performing. It's no coincidence, therefore, that Joan Crawford in Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945) and Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) have inspired dozens of drag queens. Another gay icon was Judy Garland, whose character in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) gave rise to the slang term, 'a friend of Dorothy'.
Although writers continued to slip confirmed bachelors into their scenarios, the stricter implementation of the Production Code after 1934 made it more difficult to tackle pertinent themes. Consequently, while Billy Wilder had managed to hint at Edward G. Robinson's fondness for Fred MacMurray in the noir classic, Double Indemnity (1944), Ray Milland's alcoholic in the same director's Best Picture winner, The Lost Weekend (1945), was given writer's block instead of repressed urges. Meanwhile, homophobia was replaced by anti-Semitism in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947). With its seething passions and repressed emotions, film noir appeared to be the perfect means to explore themes of identity and individuality, yet the Code continued to insist that not obviously straight characters like Clifton Webb's debonair man about town in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) were depicted as a villain or a victim.
The manly friendship between Glenn Ford and George Macready in Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) was still open to interpretation, however, although Alfred Hitchcock left few in any doubt about the nature of John Dahl and Farley Granger's relationship in Rope (1948), an adaptation of a Patrick Hamilton play that had been based on the crimes of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb that also went on to inspire Richard Fleischer's Compulsion (1959), Tom Kalin's Swoon (1992) and Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers (2002). Hitchcock would later hint at the homosexuality of two of his 'mommy's boy' characters, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), in Strangers on a Train (1951) and Psycho (1960). But, while Hollywood was covertly teaching straight audiences about homosexuality and gay viewers about how to value themselves, those outside the mainstream were going about things in a completely different manner.
Doing Things Differently
While some European countries had studio systems, socio-political control as much as commercial instinct or censorial proscription limited the number of films with gay themes and/or characters. Swedish director Mauritz Stiller channelled his own experiences into Vingarne (1916), which saw sculptor Egil Eide and model Lars Hanson driven apart by the scheming countess, Lili Beck. The Herman Bang novel that provided the source was revisited by Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer in Michael (1924), with painter Benjamin Christensen tussling with princess Nora Gregor over model Walter Slezak.
This was made for UFA in Weimar Germany, which had produced one of the earliest postwar studies of homosexuality in Richard Oswald's Different From the Others (1919), which drew on the theories of sexologist and gay rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld. Compatriot FW Murnau also wove a gay subtext through the landmark vampire picture, Nosferatu (1922), which influenced several LGBTQ+ ventures in Hollywood in the late 1930s. French polymath Jean Cocteau similarly used cinema and Surrealism to examine notions of repression and liberation in films like The Blood of a Poet (1930) and such collaborations with lover Jean Marais as La Belle et la Bête (1946), Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
One of the most important works of this period was novelist Jean Genet's sole cinematic venture, Un Chant d'amour (1950), a silent and boldly explicit take on same-sex desire behind bars that confirmed the significance of the avant-garde to gay film-making. Americans James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber employed a dazzling array of experimental techniques to consider biblical concepts of sin in Lot in Sodom (1933) before Kenneth Anger made history with Fireworks (1947), the first openly gay narrative picture produced in the United States, which follows a dreamer's homoerotic masochistic odyssey through a bar full of sailors. The sequence with a Roman candle literally created sparks and launched the Magick Lantern Cycle that is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso and contains such pivotal provocations as Puce Moment (1949) and Lucifer Rising (1981) among others, which influenced directors as different as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.
Among the underground film-makers to explore non-hetero topics was also Andy Warhol with Lonesome Cowboys (1968) while Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) made a gay icon of Maria Montez, who had starred in such extravagant Technicolor fantasies as Robert Siodmak's Cobra Woman (1944). Shirley Clarke's documentary, Portrait of Jason (1967), did much the same for hustler-cum-raconteur, Jason Holliday. But the underground was also the source of much pornographic material, as Ethan Reid recalls in the 2014 documentary, Peter De Rome: The Grandfather of Gay Porn, which traces the career of the British-born filmmaker who had worked as a publicist for Hollywood producer David O. Selznick on Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and Vittorio De Sica's Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953). De Rome's 1971 offering, Encounter, can be found on the BFI collection, Encounters, along with Lloyd Reckford's Dream A40, Andy Milligan's Vapors (both 1965) and Come Dancing (1970) by Bill Douglas, who chronicled his Scottish youth in the exemplary trilogy.
Edging Out of the Closet
Anyone watching Jane Russell performing 'Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?' in Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) could be forgiven for thinking that the Production Code had melted away and that Hollywood had embraced gay culture in the form of the buff hunks bodybuilding in a gym in the tightest of shorts. The same is true of the wild parties thrown by the uninhibited Rosalind Russell in Morton Da Costa's Auntie Mame (1958). But, the shackles were very much still in place, even though the cross-dressing Edward D. Wood, Jr. could savour the feel of an angora sweater in Glen or Glenda (1953). There was even talk that Jerry Lewis was playing an anarchic variation on the 'sissy' role opposite Dean Martin in comedies like Hal Walker's At War With the Army (1950) and Sailor Beware (1952) and Norman Taurog's Living It Up (1954) and Pardners (1956), as some of their vehicles had been reworked from old romantic comedies to tailor what had been the love interest roles for Lewis.
There were also gags about interior decorators in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back (1961), whose respective stars, Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day, also managed to keep straight faces as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon donned drag in Wilder's Some Like It Hot - complete with its zinging last line: 'Nobody's perfect.' - and Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (both 1959), which boasted the in-joke of the closeted Rock Hudson impersonating a straight man playing gay. Such knowing wit resurfaced in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Touch of Pink (2004), a homage to another Day rom-com, Delbert Mann's That Touch of Mink (1962), in which Kyle MacLachlan plays Doris's co-star, Cary Grant, in order to help gay Londoner Jimi Mistry deal with mother Suleka Mathew's efforts to find him a nice Indian bride.
Nineteen fifty-nine also saw Stephen Boyd take a cue from Montgomery Clift and John Ireland's pistol-packing banter in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) to bestrew his reunion with Charlton Heston in William Wyler's multi-Oscar-winning Ben-Hur (1959) with subtextual glances that emboldened Stanley Kubrick to include a scene in his own Roman epic, Spartacus (1960), in which Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier discuss snails and oysters and the difference between tastes and appetites. However, things hadn't changed much at all and Kubrick's tantalising exchange was cut before the initial release, although it was reinserted during the 1991 restoration, with Anthony Hopkins dubbing the dialogue of the deceased Olivier.
Indeed, in many ways, the positive attitude to some gay and lesbian characters during the Eisenhower era was counterbalanced by the depiction of the psychological anguish felt by the likes of Plato (Sal Mineo) in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Tom (John Kerr) in Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Brick (Paul Newman) in Richard Brooks's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Another Tennessee Williams adaptation, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), went even further in examining homosexual self-loathing by shooting the death of Katharine Hepburn's gay son in the style of the Monster's pursuit in Frankenstein.
Despite the 1961 tinkering with the Code to permit homosexuality to be discussed with 'care, discretion and restraint', LGBTQ+ characters continued to suffer in films like Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962), John Flynn's The Sergeant and Gordon Douglas's The Detective (1968), with a number of them meeting a grisly end as punishment for their perceived sins. A rare exception was Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which revisited 1930s Hollywood to show starlet Natalie Wood marrying closeted leading man Robert Redford to keep the press and his fans from discovering his guilty secret. But. coming in the wake of the Stonewall Riots against police harassment in June 1969, William Friedkin's adaptation of Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band (1970), proposed a new agenda for gay cinema - albeit one that Friedkin went back on in having New York cop Al Pacino infiltrate the Greenwich Village leather bar scene in Cruising (1980), a procedural thriller that was frequently disrupted during its filming, as rumours of its homophobic content spread among activists.
A Post-Stonewell Backlash
With the demise of the Production Code in 1968, American cinema seemed set for a sea change after John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) not only became the first X-rated title to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it also made no attempt to hide the fact that gigolo Joe Buck (Jon Voight) serviced male and female clients and that love underpinned his relationship with con man Enrico 'Ratso' Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Films like Harvey Hart and Jules Schwerin's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1973) took a similar tack, while Michael York followed his performance as the sexually adventurous butler in Harold Prince's Something For Everyone (1970) by playing Liza Minnelli's gay best friend in Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), which broke the record for the number of Oscar triumphs by a non-Best Picture winner.
The stories that inspired Jay Allen's victorious screenplay were written by Christopher Isherwood, who had been essayed by Laurence Harvey in Henry Cornelius's I Am a Camera (1955) and would later be played by Matt Smith in Geoffrey Sax's Christopher and His Kind (2010). Hollywood turned a similar lens on its decadent self in pictures like Mark Robson's adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Yet, while the studios embraced source material by British authors like Isherwood, it felt no compunction to copy the kind of social realist studies of same-sex love presented in Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq's Duffer (1971). Nor did it believe that there was much mileage in the kind of revisionist nostalgia proffered by Max Baer, Jr.'s Ode to Billy Joe (1976), which was set in 1953 and took its narrative cues from a 1967 chart hit by Bobbie Gentry.
As before, therefore, it was the independents who took the initiative, although one of the most infamous offerings of the period, Pink Narcissus (1971), was released anonymously before James Bidgood was eventually identified as the director. Centring on the fantasies of hustler Bobby Kendall, this dialogue-free 8mm art film caused headaches for many a censor. But it didn't set out to shock with quite the gleeful impudence of the madcap comedies directed by John Waters for his muse, Divine. Among the most provocative pictures by the so-called 'Pope of Trash' are Multiple Maniacs (1970), Female Trouble (1974) and Hairspray (1987). Divine also co-starred with erstwhile heartthrob Tab Hunter in Paul Bartel's Lust in the Dust (1985) and featured in such documentaries as Bill Weber and David Weissman's The Cockettes (2002) and Jeffrey Schwarz's I Am Divine (2013).
The most significant actuality of the post-Stonewall period was Rob Epstein and Peter Adair's Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977). But audiences were less interested in intimate testimony than in camp entertainments like Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which proved the making of Tim Curry as transvestite scientist Dr Frank-N-Furter; Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), which marked the acting debut of bisexual pop star David Bowie; and Ken Hughes's Sextette (1978), which turned out to be the swan song for its 84 year-old star, Mae West.
Audiences also responded to crime stories with a gay twist, the best of which was Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), in which Al Pacino's attempt to rob a bank to fund lover Chris Sarandon's sex change keeps hitting snags. Fugitive Jack Warden more cynically seeks sanctuary in a gay bathhouse in Richard Lester's The Ritz, while Peter Falk offers buddy John Cassavetes a hiding place after a mob boss takes out a contract on his life in Elaine May's knowing dramedy, Mikey and Nicky (both 1976).
But mainstream features continued to include LGBTQ+ characters for the sole purpose of having them kill, be cured or suffer to the point of extinction, as in the case of Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), a boldly unconventional biopic of bisexual Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who had committed public seppuku in 1970. The same-sex psycho was the most prevalent of these caricatures, with the most invidious being found in the likes of William Friedkin's previously mentioned Cruising, Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill and Gordon Willis's Windows (all 1980). But, just as such negative profiling was being challenged in documentaries like Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk and Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg's Before Stonewall (both 1984), the right-wing conservative and Christian fundamentalist groups that continued to oppose gay rights sanctimoniously justified their stance by pointing to the emergence of a seemingly unstoppable pandemic.
A Dark Shadow
The first cases of Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome were reported in 1981, but a year passed before AIDS became the accepted name for a disease that spread panic because it could be contracted from sexual contact. As the majority of the earliest casualties were intravenous drug users and homosexual men, a sense spread among the religious right that this 'plague' was a form of divine judgement. Consequently, information campaigns were launched to disabuse people of these pernicious misconceptions. But film and television were slow to respond to the growing emergency and concentrated instead on such pleas for same-sex tolerance as Arthur Hiller's Making Love, in which married doctor Michael Ontkean falls for new patient Harry Hamlin, and George Roy Hill's The World According to Garp (both 1982), for which John Lithgow received a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for his performance as male-to-female transsexual, Roberta Muldoon. Yet, there were also much to intrigue gay audiences in such diverse films as Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, Alan Parker's Fame, Mike Hodges's Flash Gordon (all 1980) and Jack Sholder's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985).
The tortuous processes involved in putting together a feature film partially explains American cinema's delay in broaching AIDS. But a degree of confusion and a reluctance to make pronouncements before the full facts were known also contributed to the cautious inertia. By 1985, however, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. had stepped into the breach with Buddies, in which Geoff Edholm reflects on his life while in the latter stages of his AIDS-related illness, and John Erman followed suit with An Early Frost (1985), a TV-movie that earned screenwriters Ron Cowen and David Lipman an Emmy for their story of Chicago lawyer Aidan Quinn's homecoming to break the news of his diagnosis to parents Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara.
Bill Sherwood opted for a blend of dignified drama and droll humour in Parting Glances (1986), which turns around the farewell party being thrown for John Bolger before he heads for Africa, leaving boyfriend Richard Ganoung to stay in New York and nurse his dying ex, Steve Buscemi. The picture became all the more poignant four years later when Sherwood died of complications from AIDS without completing another feature. In the interim, film-makers veered between melodrama in teleplays like Mike Robe's Go Toward the Light (1988), in which construction worker Richard Thomas and wife Linda Hamilton cope with the news that their haemophiliac son has contracted AIDS, and the gross-out wit in Peter Jackson's scabrous puppet lampoon, Meet the Feebles (1989), which features a hare named Harry, who is suffering from a fatal disease dubbed 'the Big One'.
Following the release of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's landmark Dustin Hoffman-narrated documentary, Common Threads: Tales From the Quilt (1989), Hollywood finally caught up with Norman René's Longtime Companion (1990), which sought to make sense of the issues for mainstream audiences through a decade-long chronicle of personal trainer Campbell Scott's engagement with the ACT UP movement after losing lover Dermot Mulroney early in the epidemic. French cinema also made its first significant statement with Savage Nights (1992), whose writer, director and star, Cyril Collard, would pass away at the age of 35 the following year.
Indeed, 1993 proved to be a banner year for AIDS movies, with the writings of Randy Shilts (who would die in 1994, along with Marlon T. Riggs, the director of the potent documentary, Tongues Untied, (1989) provided the inspiration for Roger Spottiswoode's And the Band Played On. The former was an audacious musical fantasy on how the HIV virus reached North America, while the latter starred Matthew Modine as a researcher at the Centres for Disease Control seeking to uncover the cause of a string of mysterious deaths. The year also saw the release of Peter Friedman and Tom Joslin's documentary, Silverlake Life: The View From Here, and Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia (1993), which earned Tom Hanks the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the lawyer who sues his company with the help of Denzel Washington after he being fired shortly after learning he is HIV+.
Although still not commonplace, characters with AIDS appeared in films as different as Roger Avary's Killing Zoe (1993), in which Parisian Jean-Hugues Anglade discloses his condition to crook lover Eric Stoltz, and Christopher Ashley's Jeffrey (1995), which sees New Yorker Steven Weber wondering whether he's made the right decision to swear off sex at the height of the AIDS crisis after he falls for the HIV+ Michael T. Weiss. Yet, while the focus fell firmly on male sufferers in Randal Kleiser's It's My Party (1996) and Mike Figgis's One Night Stand (1997), a growing number of films also depicted women falling prey to the disease, including Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and Lee Daniels's Precious (2009), which landed the debuting Gabourey Sidibe a Best Actress nomination for her work as the abused HIV-infected daughter of a father who dies of AIDS.
Since the turn of the century and since medical advances have stopped an HIV diagnosis from being a death sentence (at least, in more privileged parts of the world), cinema has returned to the topic with less frequency and urgency. Hence, the likes of Tony Piccirillo's The 24th Day (2004) and Louis Leterrier's Grimsby (2016) have exploited it for thrills and laughs. But Hollywood has continued to remind audiences of the gravity of the situation in the 1980s in pictures like Chris Columbus's Rent (2005), Chris Mason Johnson's Test (2013) and Yen Tan's 1985 (2018), although French features set in the same period, including Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget (2009) and Robin Campillo's 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017), have been much weightier affairs, as have such documentaries as Paul Taylor's We Are Together (2006), David France's How to Survive a Plague (2012) and Barak Heymann, Tomer Heymann and Alexander Bodin Saphir's Who's Gonna Love Me Now? (2016).
Over the last decade, however, Hollywood has recognised the potency of the AIDS biopic, with Jim Carrey starring as con artist Steven Jay Russell in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Philip Morris (2009) and Jason Mitchell playing HIV+ NWA member Eric 'Eazy-E' Wright in F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton (2015). Indeed, these films have frequently scooped major acting awards, with Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto both winning Oscars for their work in Dallas Buyers Club, Jean-Marc Vallée's memoir of Ron Woodruff, who smuggled experimental drugs into Texas to help his friends. Michael Douglas also received an Emmy for his portrayal of pianist Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra (both 2013), while Rami Malek took the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury, in Bryan Singer's Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
New Queer Cinema
The hesitancy of Ronald Reagan's administration to respond to the AIDS crisis and the stigma that had been imposed upon the LGBTQ+ community gave rise to an eruption of cinematic fury, pride, defiance and transgression. In a 1992 article in Sight and Sound, critic B. Ruby Rich called the wave 'New Queer Cinema', which recognised the reclaiming of a term that had acquired a pejorative meaning to signify any non-hetero sexuality outside the procreative monogamous norm advocated by traditionalist cisgender society. Taking their cues from academic studies of third-wave feminism and queer theory, the new breed of film-maker sought to 'confuse binary essentialisms around gender and sexual identity' by exposing the limitations of popularly accepted conceptions of gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals and transsexuals, as well as those opting to identify (or not) with other gender categories.
Although they tended to consider complementary or overlapping topics, these new queer films were often dissimilar in their approach and aesthetic. Yet Rich insisted that they shared a 'Homo Porno' style in appropriating and pastiching classical strategies with a radical mix of energy, irreverence, minimalism and/or excess that set them apart from what had gone before. Naturally, such abrasive (and often apolitical) advocacy and the frank depiction of same-sex activity unsettled some. But, as Rich stated: 'They're here, they're queer, get hip to them.'
Setting the trend was Paris Is Burning (1990), Jennie Livingston's award-winning documentary about New York's drag ball sub-culture in the 1980s. But the 'Godmother of New Queer Cinema' was Christine Vachon, who produced such key pictures as Todd Haynes's Poison (1991) and Tom Kalin's Swoon (1992). The former wove together three different storylines, while the latter revisited the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case to follow the efforts of Daniel Schlachert and Craig Chester to get away with murder. Renegades abound in New Queer Cinema with cop killer Mike Dytri going on the lam with HIV+ writer Craig Gilmore in Gregg Araki's consciously provocative road movie, The Living End (1992). This appropriation of generic traits was typical of many NQC outings, including Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), which echoed Midnight Cowboy in accompanying narcoleptic hustler River Phoenix on a quest to find his mother with protective pal Keanu Reeves.
As Swoon used the strapline 'Puts the Homo Back in Homicide', there were concerns that New Queer Cinema was perpetuating negative stereotypes. Araki often bore the brunt of such criticisms for his unflinchingly provocative characterisation in pictures like Totally F***ed Up (1993), Mysterious Skin (2004) and Kaboom (2010). Others noted an intellectual elitism in the frequent resort to queer and postmodern theory, while accusations were levelled at the degree of 'lesbian invisibility' and the lack of racial diversity that made NQC something of a white boys' club. But, for all the focus on male desire, New Queer Cinema did much to confront Hollywood's habit of 'straight washing' historical LGBTQ+ characters. Todd Haynes, who would go on to direct such landmark works as Velvet Goldmine (1997), I'm Not There (2007), Carol (2015) and Wonderstruck (2017), summed it up best when he said: 'New Queer Cinema produced complex work that didn't simply create new gay heroes as subjects. It dealt with the politics of representation, it ventured into transgressive themes (and) challenged simple ideas about victimhood and subjugation.'
Getting Used to It
In 1971, the Latvian-born German film-maker Rosa von Praunheim released the tellingly titled It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. However, a dismaying amount of time had to pass before societies across the developed world got used to the gay rights slogan about being here and queer. By the 1990s, however, Hollywood started making tentative attempts to produce films with LGBTQ+ themes and/or characters for mainstream audiences, although not all of them were as subtle as Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1988), which doesn't actually have any gay characters. However, when Christian Slater and Winona Ryder kill homophobic jocks Lance Fenton and Patrick Labyorteaux, their fake suicide note tells of their forbidden love for one another.
Coming complete with happy endings, initial offerings like Fred Schepisi's Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Andrew Fleming's Threesome (1994) and Frank Oz's In & Out (1997) seemed to be trying too hard to normalise situations. So did cross-dressing capers like Chris Columbus's Mrs Doubtfire (1993) and Mike Nichols's The Birdcage (1996), which was a remake of Édouard Molinaro's French hit, La Cage aux Folles (1978). And the same also went for PJ Hogan's My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Nicholas Hytner's The Object of My Affection (1998) and John Schlesinger's The Next Best Thing (2000), which sought to get viewers on side (and on message) by giving their heroines a gay confidante.
But, towards the turn of the century, indie offerings like Tommy O'Haver's Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998) and Greg Berlanti's The Broken Hearts Club (2000) helped show how it was done and, subsequently, gay characters and issues have been cropping up in pictures as different as Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995), Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000), Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999), Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) and Stephen Chlomsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012).
The situation was further ameliorated by the fact that the Academy membership (a growing proportion of which identified as LGBTQ+) kept giving Oscars to films with gay protagonists. Naturally, protests were made that the roles should have been played by non-hetero performers. Nevertheless, the Best Actor displays by William Hurt in Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Philip Seymour Hoffman in Bennett Miller's Capote (2005) and Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008) did much to raise the profile of LGBTQ+ issues, as did the Best Actress wins of Hilary Swank in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999) and Nicole Kidman in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), and the Best Supporting Actor successes of Christopher Plummer in Mike Mills's Beginners (2010) and JK Simmons in Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (2014). Topping it off, of course, was the Best Picture triumph of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016), which earned Mahershala Ali the Best Supporting prize for his work as the Cuban drug dealer who reassures young Alex Hibbert that he shouldn't feel ashamed of being gay. However, many felt that Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) should also have taken Best Picture over Paul Haggis's Crash (2004), especially as it had already won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and turned same-sex attraction between manly men into a topic of water-cooler conversation.
As gay movies became more accepted, they started to fall into the sub-genres that fared the best at the box office and at specialist festivals. One of the most enduringly popular topics is coming out and Cinema Paradiso not only offers users such gems as Dirk Shafer's Circuit (2001), Émile Gaudreault's Mambo Italiano (2003) and Greg Berlanti's Love, Simon (2018), but also Bryan Singer's X-Men 2 (2003), which includes the priceless moment when mother Madeline (Jill Teed) asks son Bobby 'Iceman' Drake (Shawn Ashmore) if he has 'ever tried not being a mutant?'
Romcoms and first love stories have also done brisk business, with the following titles being available for rental: Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche (1986), Thomas Bezucha's Big Eden (2000), Jonah Markowitz's Shelter (2007) and Dito Montiel's Boulevard (2014). Also worth exploring are such dramas as Sean Mathias's Bent (1997), Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009), the excellent Ira Sachs duo of Keep the Light On (2012), and Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Joel Edgerton's Boy Erased (both 2018), which both tackle the contentious topic of gay conversion therapies.
Back in 1946, Cary Grant had played a palimpsest version of composer Cole Porter opposite Alexis Smith as Linda Lee Thomas in Michael Curtiz's biopic, Night and Day (1946). But Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely (2004) only went some way to erasing the straight-washing by making Porter bisexual, as Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd took over the roles. Elsewhere, Macaulay Culkin played New York Club Kids creator Michael Alig in Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbaro's Party Monster (2003), Aunjanue Ellis and Daniel Sunjata cropped up as Harlem Renaissance figures Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes in Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother (2004), Toby Jones made his own impression as Truman Capote in Douglas McGrath's Infamous (2006) and James Franco essayed the role of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010). Also worthy of note are two very different documentaries, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003) and Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall's Call Me Kuchu (2012), with the latter profiling Uganda's first openly gay man, David Kato.
Cross-dressing has been central to pictures like Del Shores's Sordid Lives (2001) and John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006), which caused something of a stir with its unsimulated sex scenes. Mitchell is no stranger to controversy, however, having explored transgender issues with equal frankness in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), which has since been followed with such lauded dramas as Duncan Tucker's Transamerica (2005), Sean S. Baker's Tangerine (2015) and Sebastián Lelio's A Fantastic Woman (2018), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and saw star Daniela Vega become the first transgender presenter at the Academy Awards.
As Hollywood continues to pursue its impossible agenda of pleasing all of the people all of the time, it keeps making mistakes and causing offence to those on either side of a debate that can still divide the nation, as the recent case involving Empire (2015-) actor Jussie Smollett demonstrates. It sometimes seems as though the studios have resorted to yesteryear tactics by offering homoerotic titbits in features like Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991), Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012) and Gregory Jacobs's Magic Mike XXL (2015). This reliance on frisson was evident in the interaction between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Neil Jordan's take on Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire (1994), although horror makers haven't always been so subtle, as Paul Etheredge's Hellbent (2004) and Joe Ahearne's B&B (2017) testify.
Yet, Mitch Downe (Casey Affleck) became the first openly gay character in an animated feature in Sam Fell and Chris Butler's spooky comedy, ParaNorman (2012). Moreover, Gaston (Luke Evans) and LeFou (Josh Gad) became the first Disney characters to embrace homosexuality in Bill Condon's live-action version of Beauty and the Beast (2017). For many years, there has been speculation that a clutch of Disney and Pixar animations have contained coded characters, with cases being made for Captain Hook in Peter Pan (1953), Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989), Jafar in Aladdin (1992), Governor Ratcliffe and Wiggins in Pocahontas (1995), Kronk and Yzma in The Emperor's New Groove (2000), Merida in Brave (2012) and Bucky and Pronk in Zootropolis (2016). Such was the furore over Gaston and LeFou's dance during the ball that countries like Malaysia banned Beauty and the Beast. But what the scene actually revealed is that American cinema hasn't come very far in its depiction of LGBTQ+ characters since two men waltzed to a violin way back in 1894.
