The Celluloid Closet

..Not all girls are raving bloody lesbians you know!
..That is a misfortune that I am perfectly well aware of.

In a hundred years of movies, homosexuality has only rarely been depicted on the screen. When it did appear, it was there as something to laugh at or something to pity or even something to fear... Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people, and gay people what to think about themselves. Noone escaped its influence.

The Celluloid Closet is a 1995 documentary movie based on the book of the same name written by Vito Russo. Russo had made a highly detailed, years of research of how gay people are portrayed in movie history, especially in Hollywood, and he is also one of the first people to persuade gay and straight people to examine the role that popular culture plays in shaping our attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity. The film contains scenes from over 100 movies, most of which are highly mainstream, and there are also interviews with writers, screenwriters and actors, such as Arthur Laurents, Susie Bright, Gore Vidal, Tom Hanks and Whoopi Goldberg.

It is interesting to see so many hidden codes of homosexuality inside those very well known films, which had to be kept in Hollywood's "closet" because of the "clean" society's take on homosexuality. I had seen some of those movies, but I had not picked up on the characters' preferance of sexuality, and neither did many other people, because the filmmakers had to deliberately hide these referances in between the lines, and yet, everyone in Hollywood knew who was gay and what those scenes were about.

The role and identity given to the gay characters in the movies changed as did the society. While Chaplin had kissed a woman who was thought to be a man by the other characters in the movie "Behind The Screen" in 1916 and while one of the earliest examples of the movies, "Dickson Experimental Film 1895" had shown two men dancing to a light opera piece for 17 seconds, it...was a time when men were free to express tenderness on the screen. But as the world grew more aware of homosexuality, male-to-male affection would be seen as an incriminating act. And so came the sissies, the effeminate male characters in the movies, often skinny and with little moustache, who were neither gay nor straight, but were-in-between, making the women in the movie to be seen more womanly and the other men to be seen more manly. And these men were always a standard laughing point no matter what, as Arthur Laurents describes, "they were cliche and I thought they were disgusting..never understood what people were laughing at.."

By 1934, because of the increasing sexual scenes in the movies, whether heterosexual or homosexual, came the long period of censorship, where the hidden lines of homosexuality always found its place in a great deal of the very well known movies, among which there is the love shared many years before the movie's period between the characters played by Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd in Ben Hur (without Heston knowing this hidden history of the characters throughout the shooting of the film), Brick Pollitt's unnamed loyalty (or love) to his "friend" Skipper in the Cat On A Hot Tin Roof or 15-year-old Plato's attraction to legendary Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause. This censored time had passed by hiding or showing dull relationships between two sexes such as bunch of Doris Day movies (in one of which, Pillow Talk, her partner in the movie, Rock Hudson, plays a straight man imitating a gay man, while in real life, Hudson was gay).

When this period passes, when the gay persona in the movies seem to publicly appear by breaking the rules, the end that was decided for the character was death by either suicide or a "rightful" murder, because "they were sick, there was something wrong with them, and being gay was not something good people talked about". It would take almost three decades for the homosexuality to come up "clean", "tender" and "normal" in Hollywood, and it would have to pass by tragedies, monstrous characters or pity, which, rightfully, do not satisfy the gay audiences, even today. A movie which involves a serious character analysis related to a gay man may take the oscar statue home with that character, but at the end of the day, he is a poor guy who died of AIDS and we feel sorry for him; and yet, we still do not ask, where is the gay hero who is healthy and alive ?