How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [43]
Retrofitted projects:
The gayest movie I’ve seen in the last few years is Down with Love, an homage to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies, with Renée Zellwegger as Doris, Ewan McGregor as Rock, and Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce in the ambisexual Tony Randall role. In this category of gay recycled movie material, I also nominate the witty film rehabs performed by writer Paul Rudnick, who made the new Addams Family movies into total camp experiences.
Horror films:
Gay directors virtually invented the horror genre. Starting with E. W. Murnau, the director of the early silent Dracula flicks in the 1920s, and continuing with James Whale, the gay director of the original Frankenstein movies, the horror film has always had a definite homosexual inflection. Says film critic Richard Barrios in his book about gay movies and actors, Screened Out:
The gayness of Whale’s horror films is seldom on the surface, for his dry theatrical wit rarely permitted anything so overt. Instead, there are hints and symbols, coded references. . . . Whales’ misfit outsiders pitted against hostile mobs, his unholy same-sex friendships, and his amused skewing of hetero norms all form a base camp for queer film theory.
It’s interesting that new Hollywood recently rediscovered Murnau and Whale—in 2000, John Malkovich starred as the very weird Dracula director in Shadow of the Vampire and Ian McKellen portrayed James Whale in the 1998 biopic Gods and Monsters, with Brendan Fraser as the straight object of his affection.
The horror comedy The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is a great example of a queer movie that crossed over to straight audiences almost immediately. Not a horror pic per se, but a wacky homage to all haunted house/Dracula/ Frankenstein movies of the past, the movie features two “innocent” newlyweds, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, who are drawn into the perverted bisexual atmosphere of the mad scientist Frank-N-Furter. “I’m just a sweet transvestite, from Transexual Transylvania,” sings Tim Curry in the role. There are references to Steve Reeve movies, and Dr. Frank-N-Furter is building a “monster” who will be his sex slave—a blond gay gymrat with six-pack abs. By the end of the movie, almost everyone has engaged in sex of all kinds—heterosexual, homosexual, threesomes, etc.
Like all baby boomers coming of age in the stoned seventies, I must have seen Rocky Horror fifteen times. It always played at midnight after a double feature at repertory film houses. And it played on campuses all across the country. By the eighties, people sang along with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, talked over all the best lines, and even wore costumes from the movie. The film was probably one of the gayest influences on straight students ever to come along. And yet I must confess to another Liberace Syndrome moment: Back then, I rarely even considered the film’s gay “subtext,” even though the queerness there was too “out” to be subtext. Rocky Horror is a gay text—campy, swishy, and brilliant.
The Gay Event That Made Heterosexuals Sing
An amazing event is taking place in cities around the world. I first saw it in London, then in New York, then even in my hometown of Philadelphia. This event draws hopelessly heterosexual couples with their noisy children, diaper bags, and Cheerios dispensers. But it’s also filled with men in nun costumes and Tyrolean dresses. I’m talking about the Singalong Sound of Music—if ever there was a place where gay tastes and heterosexual needs converge, this is it.
The Singalong Sound of Music, which began as a one-night event at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, was an immediate success. Like so many kitschy gay art forms, it had no trouble crossing over to the straight world. In fact, many straight people have no idea that it was once a fairly exclusive gay event, and maybe even some gay people are confused. I was watching Will & Grace one night, and the writers had developed a situation in