How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [46]
Cary Grant did more to create masculinity on screen than any other actor. How ironic that he was most likely bisexual. The great love of his life was said to be fellow actor Randolph Scott, with whom he lived for seven years before embarking upon five disastrous marriages. It makes sense that Grant was discovered by the greatest cinema fag-hag of all time, Mae West. She cast him as a boy toy in She Done Him Wrong—it was to Grant that she uttered her famous line, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”
Movie critics note that Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn were well matched in the films they did together because Hepburn’s masculine traits were a good foil for Grant’s softer, more feminine personality. As much as I like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, I think my favorite Hepburn /Grant movie is the very queer flop of a picture Sylvia Scarlett, directed by the gay George Cukor. Made in 1935 (five years before The Philadelphia Story), Sylvia Scarlett is the strange tale of a girl and her father who flee France to escape scandal and end up touring the English countryside as entertainers. Hepburn is dressed in men’s clothing throughout most of the movie, and there is sexual tension between her and Cary Grant, who plays an insincere scallywag with a horrible cockney accent. It’s almost like a chaste homosexual love affair.
Yet it is the Hitchcock version of Cary Grant that most influenced my ideal of the suave, masculine hero. I think of him dangling from Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, or making love to Eva Marie Saint in the same film, especially in the final sexy scene in which the phallic train goes into the tunnel. He’s also a sexy he-man in To Catch a Thief, captivating Grace Kelly with his bad-boy ways. No one wore a tuxedo better than Cary Grant—his Monte Carlo nightclub scenes in To Catch a Thief are like gorgeous male-model photo shoots.
And then there’s Notorious, Hitchcock’s thriller about patriotism and sexual attraction. The early kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman has gone down in history as one of the sexiest in filmdom. And Grant is every girl’s dream as he rescues Bergman from the clutches of her Nazi husband, Claude Rains.
By the time Stanley Donen cast him as a suave agent of many identities in the spy caper film Charade, Cary Grant was in his fifties, but still as handsome as ever. Costar Audrey Hepburn’s androgynous look seemed to emphasize Grant’s irresistible masculinity.
I don’t care if Cary Grant was a nelly. He’s my ideal man, and I’m sure a lot of women would agree: Homosexual or effeminate men are the closest to what heterosexual women think of as a real man, a guy with looks and brains who cares about his body and is always polite to women. That combination doesn’t come along very much in the heterosexual world.
Rumors of homosexuality have swirled around many of today’s leading men. Tom Cruise has sued and won over tabloid allegations that he is a homosexual. Gossip about the possible gayness of John Travolta, Brendan Fraser, Hugh Jackman, Colin Farrell, Kevin Spacey, and others will always be around. Will we ever find out who’s gay and who’s not? Does it matter? And, since the world of movies is all smoke and mirrors anyway, why can’t filmgoers accept the idea that some leading men are bisexuals or even exclusively homosexual? I would contend that even straight leading men are following in a tradition of the gay aesthetic when it comes to “selling” male beauty.
Our culture’s ideal man has always been shaped by homo vibes. As a kid I watched many Rock Hudson movies on television, and adored him as Susan Saint James’s husband on TV’s McMillan & Wife. I thought he was almost hypermascu