Handy-Dandy Chart

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Conclusion

My original project was much wider in scope, but I eventually narrowed it down to romantic comedies, teen movies, with a few historically significant dramas. I regret that I didn’t actually review any movies with transgender characters.

The movies I reviewed can be generally divided into two basic groups: queer protagonists, and gay best friends. There are certainly movies with gay villains out there, but due to the conventions of the genres I generally stayed within, gay male friends were most plentiful.

One interesting thing I learned from doing this project was that straight people don’t seem to have lesbian friends. The closest we come to a main character having a lesbian best friend is Janis in Mean Girls, and that’s just a big rumor. In fact, I have trouble thinking of any straight character in any movie that has a lesbian as a best friend. Part of this is that there’s hardly any lesbians in movies in general, but I’d bet part of it has to do with the fact that lesbians and gay men occupy very different realms of cultural stereotypes. Gay men, according to the movies, are like straight men that will never break a straight girl’s heart. They are glamorous. They are cultured. They exist to make straight girls happy, be it by providing makeovers, a sympathetic ear, lessons about art, advice about boys, or just no-strings-attached male attention. They never ask for anything in return, and never have enough of a plotline to make anyone uncomfortable. This spreads over to real life—I’ve heard straight women describe themselves as looking for a gay boyfriend. They don’t want a friend who is gay; they want someone to buy shoes and go see Rent with. These are the same women who love going to gay bars because “no one hits on [them] there.”

Lesbians, on the other hand, can’t be the designated sexless friend for straight girls in movies because there’s always the possibility of a lesbian hitting on the straight girl. And lesbians don’t have any particular culturally-ascribed superpowers outside of understanding environmentalism, playing acoustic guitars, and getting male attention. Nothing that’s really helpful to the Cher Horowitzes of the world.

My theory is that the reason the gay friends in movies never get to date is that writers and directors have a very specific set of boundaries for what makes a straight (universal) movie into a gay (niche) one. If a gay guy squeals over a girl, it’s funny. If he squeals over a boy, and the boy responds positively, it’s threatening to the hypothetically conservative viewer. The one notable exception in the films I watched was Four Weddings and a Funeral.

In films with queer protagonists (But I’m a Cheerleader, Kissing Jessica Stein, Saving Face, Imagine Me & You, D.E.B.S.) , I was struck by how homogenous the protagonists were, which is likely a reflection of the homogeneity of Hollywood in general. Everyone was middle to upper class. Everyone, except for the women of Saving Face, was white, with a few friends of color. I also thought it was interesting how similar the characters were in appearance. They’re all thin, with long, shiny hair, and conventionally feminine ways of dressing. Since all of these are coming out stories, it might be that the filmmakers wanted to show that lesbians can look like anyone, or they might have wanted to get people in the theatres by delivering conventionally beautiful women. I thought it was interesting how some of the protagonists’ love interests appeared—not more masculine, precisely, but less “Barbie heterosexual,” to borrow a phrase from Imagine Me & You. They’re all feminine, conventionally beautiful women, but they tend to have shorter, darker hair (again, Saving Face being the exception), and in the case of the adult women, have artistic rather than conventional careers (I’m counting jewel theft as an artistic career for D.E.B.S.). While they wear feminine clothing, they generally wear more pants and darker colors. They represent a more free-spirited, less “conventional” femininity, while still being conventionally feminine enough that, were they not standing next to their love interests, no one would ever identify their appearance as transgressive in any way.

One thing I thought was interesting was that in all five movies, the main, viewpoint, characters are always originally in the passive role, being pursued by other women. They’re also generally the ones who are still discovering or defining their sexualities. Except for Wil in Saving Face, the protagonists of all the movies start the film identifying as heterosexual, and change along the way. Part of this is the popularity of the coming out story as a genre, and I’d bet that part of it has to do with getting audiences—again, the hypothetically conservative audiences—to go to a movie about women who start the movie as out and proud lesbians. I’d suspect that producers believe that audiences can more easily identify with the seemingly straight characters, and they may be right. It’s also possible that lesbian romantic comedies are drawing from straight archetypes, where the more passive character is more “feminine.”

In the future, I’d really like to see more diversity in movies about queer people, be it about racial, economic, geographic, religious, or gender identity. (This applies to movies about straight people as well.) I’d also like to see more genre movies as opposed to the conventional coming out, first-love kind of story. One movie I didn’t review, but really enjoy, is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a parody of noir films, where Val Kilmer plays a tough as nails, somewhat effeminate detective whose gayness is notable in that the perspective it gives him helps him fight bad guys, like when he shoots a hit man with a revolver hidden in his balls—“Homophobes never check there.” I think someday we’ll have a whole slew of gay action movies, gay detective movies, gay musicals, etc. Maybe even a gay teen movie where straight girls help gay boys find love, or a movie where straight and gay girls are friends.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

This is a rare example of a straight man having a gay best friend—two of them! Who have individual personalities! And never help anyone shop for anything! Oh, and they have love lives, with each other, which isn’t heavily emphasized until one of the couple dies. But he doesn’t kill himself or get murdered or die of AIDS—he has a completely banal heart attack, at a party, in his fifties, after spending his life drinking and smoking and generally having a good time. After he dies, the Hugh Grant character notes that while their group of friends had always rejected conventional settling-down, the two men had been “married all along.” There’s also this tearjerker, and notice how when the pastor describes Matthew as one of Gareth's "closest friends," he describes himself as a "splendid bugger":



But the movie doesn’t even make Matthew, the surviving member of the couple, be miserable for the rest of the film: during the “where-are-they-now” montage over the closing credits, we find out that he eventually gets married to some really hot guy. One of the nice things about this movie is that Gareth and Matthew aren’t stereotypically gay, but not in a way that seems the filmmakers are patting themselveson the backs for being so darn progressive. Their relationship provides the emotional heart of the movie, but being gay isn’t shown as anything particularly remarkable in their group of friends, and, while Matthew is the friend the Hugh Grant character repeatedly turns to for advice, it isn’t because he has any kind of gay superpowers. He’s just really levelheaded, and, as Hugh Grant points out, the only one of them to maintain a successful relationship. I could use more of this kind of gay best friend in the movies.

The Children's Hour and Advise and Consent

1961 and 1962 were not, it would seem, a good time for the gays.

It was, however, a groundbreaking two years in representation of gays and lesbians in Hollywood. It saw the premiere of The Children’s Hour in 1961 and Advise and Consent in 1962, which benefited enormously from the repeal of the Hayes Code, which banned representation of homosexual content in the movies. Advise and Consent notably features the first gay bar in American movies after WWII.

They’re both phenomenally depressing, in very similar ways. In , Shirley McLaine and Audrey Hepburn play schoolteachers who become the targets of a heinous little girl’s rumors that they’re lesbians. The women lose their school, their reputations, and a court case. Audrey Hepburn’s fiance leaves her out of suspicion, but she manages to hang on to her self-respect, because she knows they’ve been falsely accused. Not so for McLaine, who tearfully declares her love for Audrey Hepburn, then promptly hangs herself.

Shirley McClaine talks about the process of making the movie in the Celluloid Closet, and regrets the way her character turned out:



Likewise, Advise and Consent features a senator who’s being blackmailed over a gay encounter he had in the military. He goes to a gay bar, runs into an old lover, and, horrified at both what he witnesses in the bar and the threat of his own exposure, he slits his own throat.

In both movies, homophobia destroys two people, and the homosexuals become unfortunate objects of pity who kill themselves out of disgust. On some level, this is a lack of storytelling courage or imagination—what would happen to these people if they didn’t kill themselves? Where would the movie possibly go? The senator in Advise and Consent meets gay men who are pimps and blackmailers; there are no other lesbians in The Children’s Hour. All McLaine’s character has is Audrey Hepburn, who will never return her feelings—where is the story supposed to go from there? The movies offer pity for the unwilling homosexuals, who, after all, can’t help but hate themselves. It’s depressing. The movies are interesting historical documents, and Advise and Consent is pretty well-made, but they so accurately capture a particular way of thinking that they’re hard to watch.

Saved!

“You’re not born a gay, you’re born again!”

In the imaginary competition between Juno and Saved, Saved wins hands down. Mandy Moore throws a Bible at a pregnant girl while dressed as one of Charlie’s Angels, okay? This movie is worth watching for that scene alone. Not to mention the part where Mandy Moore drives her car into Jesus.

In queer news, aattempt to save a gay kid from homosexuality sets the entire film in motion. When Mary, who has been born again her entire life, finds out that her boyfriend, a completely sincere figure-skater for Jesus, is gay, she knows that she has to save him. She also has this vision from Christ:

When she finds out that the love of Christ can restore a girl’s virginity, she knows that Jesus wants her to have sex with Dean. By the time Mary finds out she’s pregnant, Dean has been whisked away to Mercy House, a depository for Christian kids who fall prey to drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy, or gayness. When the rest of the school finds out about Dean’s gayness, they hold a prayer circle, and tell Mary that they’re sorry about his faggotry. Mary gets sick of her community's judgment and hypocrisy and starts hanging out with the school's scandalous Jew, who helps her shoplift maternity clothes.

For a moment, Mary thinks about telling her mom she’s pregnant, but when her mom tells her that if Mary were gay, she’d send her to Mercy House like Dean because she wouldn’t know how to handle it, Mary decides to keep it to herself. And indeed, when the pastor finds out that Mary’s pregnant, he tries to get Mary’s mom to send her away. While Dean’s in Mercy House, he gets a boyfriend, and (sadly, offscreen) stages a mutiny, hijacks a church van, and then crashes the prom with his new boyfreind and posse of Christian outcast teens, where we learn the very special message of the movie:

It’s not subtle, but neither are ex-gay camps, and besides, it's aimed at thirteen-year-olds. What I really like about Saved! is how compassionate it is. Even Bible-throwing Hillary Faye gets some redemption in the end, and Mary isn’t villainized for trying to de-gay Dean, because she did it out of genuine, if ignorant, love and concern. There’s also a great moment where Mary, after accepting Dean’s homosexuality, refers to his (seventeen-year-old) boyfriend as his life-partner. It’s a movie about imperfect people trying to be more Christlike and taking unexpected turns along the way.

D.E.B.S.

Finally, a dumb, campy, lesbian spy parody romantic comedy! The secret genre combination of my heart.

Basically, the D.E.B.S. are an elite international spy organization/college. They fight crime in what appears to be leftover slutty schoolgirl Halloween costumes, carry lots of guns (the bullets never hit anything), and have conversations with holograms on the regular. If you find this picture, of the D.E.B.S. on a stakeout inside a restaurant hilarious, this is the movie for you:


Star D.E.B. Amy falls in love with supervillainness Lucy Diamond, who is also the subject of her women’s studies and crime thesis. She runs off with her and, when the rest of the D.E.B.S. come to rescue her, is disgraced. Lucy escapes capture, and, with the encouragement of her straight best friend/henchman, decides to reform herself and win Amy back with a musical montage:



While it’s a coming out story, everyone gets over Amy’s lesbianism pretty quickly. The issue isn’t that she’s dating a girl, but that she’s dating someone who regularly tries to sink Australia. I hope that someday soon, ridiculous queer genre movies will be widely available, instead of just romantic comedies and tragedies, which I like, but come on, don’t you want to watch a gay action movie? Or a gay monster movie? Or a gay heist movie? (Other than Thelma and Louise?) We need a lesbian Tarantino.

Some Like it Hot (1959)

If you’ve never seen Some Like it Hot, you should go do that. I’ll wait.

If you still haven’t seen it, Some Like it Hot is a classic cross-dressing comedy. Though it's not technically a gay movie, there's a male/male relationship, and lots of blurring of gender boundaries, with a lack of gay panic that would be refreshing today, let alone in 1959.

Two down on their luck jazz musicians witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and go on the run, but can only find work in an all-girl’s orchestra, so they dress up as Daphne and Josephine and go to Miami. Joe/Josephine (Tony Curtis) sets about trying to seduce Marilyn Monroe, and Jerry/Dapne (Jack Lemmon) finds himself dating an elderly playboy millionaire. As the charade goes on, the Jack Lemmon becomes more absorbed in his Daphne persona, and the beta relationship progresses until gender becomes somewhat beside the point:

Jerry: Have I got things to tell you!
Joe: What happened?
Jerry: I'm engaged.
Joe: Congratulations. Who's the lucky girl?
Jerry: I am!
Joe: WHAT?!
Jerry: Osgood proposed to me! We're planning a June wedding.
Joe: What are you talking about? You can't marry Osgood.
Jerry: Why, you think he's too old for me?
Joe: Jerry, you can't be serious.
Jerry: Why not? He keeps marrying girls all the time.
Joe: But, you're not a girl! You're a guy, and, why would a guy wanna marry a guy?
Jerry: For security! Look, I know there's a problem, Joe.
Joe: I'll say there is.
Jerry: His mother - we need her approval, but I'm not worried because I don't smoke.
Joe: Jerry. There's another problem, like what are you gonna do on your honeymoon?
Jerry: We've been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera but I'm kinda leaning toward Niagra Falls.
Joe: My God.
Jerry: I don't expect it to last Joe. I'll tell him when the time's right.
Joe: Like when?
Jerry: Like right after the ceremony. Then we get a quick annulment, he makes a nice little settlement on me and I keep getting those alimony checks every month.
Joe: Jerry listen to me there are laws, conventions. It's just not been done.
Jerry: Joe this may be my last chance to marry a millionaire.
Joe: Oh, Jerry — Jerry, will you take my advice? Forget about the whole thing, will ya? Just keep telling yourself: you're a boy, you're a boy.
Jerry: I'm a boy.
Joe: That's the boy.
Jerry: I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I wish I were dead. I'm a boy. Boy, oh boy, am I a boy. Now, what am I gonna do about my engagement present?
Joe: What engagement present?
Jerry: Osgood gave me a bracelet.
Joe: [examining it] Hey, these are real diamonds!
Jerry: Of course they're real! What do you think? My fiance is a bum?

Director Billy Wilder couldn’t figure out how to end the film, so the actor improvised the final line as a placeholder until someone could write something better:



As if that's not enough, it was rated C for Condemned by the Catholic Decency League, and was banned in Kansas City. So you know they did something right.

Kissing Jessica Stein

“She wanted to be with someone a little more…gay, I guess is the thing.”

Kissing Jessica Stein is about a straight lady who dates a girl, dreads having sex with her, and then dumps her for her ex-boyfriend, but I still pretty much liked it. Helen decides to try dating women, and places an ad in the paper, which Jessica answers on a lark. The part of the movie dealing with Jessica’s anxiety about anyone finding out she’s with Helen, and overcoming her initial repulsion to lesbian sex, stressed me out a lot. I mean, I don’t have the greatest taste in girlfriends, but if you have to actively work to overcome your partner’s disgust with the idea of touching you, you could maybe do just a little bit better. Especially if you look like Helen.

But Jessica’s many neuroses, and her panic about bisexuality, are presented as symptoms of her perfectionism and anxiety about life in general. She’s picky about everything, and decides to go out with Helen because she’s ruled out the entire male gender, and then realizes that the emotional fulfillment she and Helen share isn’t enough to make up for the lack of sex Helen wants. What Jessica wants is a best friend to cuddle with and keep her from being lonely, and Helen wants to be in love.

Helen’s bisexuality is treated with surprising decency: she goes out with Jessica as an experiment, and decides she likes women as well as men, without any of the hand-wringing and self-flagellation Jessica goes through. She decides what she wants and then gets on with it, and at the end of the film, when she and Jessica have broken up, is still dating both men and women. She and her two gay male friends have a series of conversations that seem to be intended to answer lesbian complaints about the plot of the movie, including one where her friend compares having a lesbian relationship on a whim to wearing blackface, to which Helen responds, “Oh, come on, that’s a bad comparison. People are born black,” and her friend says, “Exactly!” The movie seems to be suggesting that sexual orientation is less set than many people are comfortable with, including, I guess, me—maybe because that scenario of your girlfriend dating you on a whim and then leaving you for a boy because it turns out she doesn’t like having sex with you, but really likes the emotional support, is terrifying. Which is the source of a lot of biphobia, and wrong, and not so much a problem with bisexuality as people making mistakes with what they want, but Jessica Stein is kind of a nightmare scenario.

There are a lot of things I really liked about Kissing Jessica Stein. The acting is great, and the dialogue is witty. Jessica’s relationship with her family is lovely. This scene with her mother, right after Helen dumps her for not coming out, has the most emotional depth in the entire film:

Mom: You okay?

Jessica: Uh, I don’t know. No.

Mom: What is it, Jess?

Jessica: It’s just sometimes I tihnk I’m gonna be alone forever…You can jump in any time.

Mom: You’re my love, you know that? My beloved. But sometimes I worry for you.

Jessica: I worry for me too.

Mom: Sweetheart. I will never forget when you were in the fifth grade, and you were so excited when you got the lead in the play. Do you remember that? Really Rosie.

Jessica: Really Rosie. Yeah, I remember.

Mom: And you came home after the first day of rehearsal, and you turned to me, and you said, ‘Mommy, I’m not gonna do it. I quit.’ Just like that. I turned to you and I said, ‘Jessie, Jessie my love, why?’ And you said, ‘Because my costar isn’t good enough. And if my costar isn’t good enough, then the play won’t be good enough. And I don’t want to be part of any play that isn’t good enough.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Oy. This child will suffer. How this child will suffer.’ And then they gave it to the meskite with the glasses.

Jessica: Tess Greenblatt.

Mom: Right.

Jessica: God, she was terrible.

Mom: Right. And you would have been great. And you didn’t get to do it. You had to sit there and watch terrible Tess do it with that guy you thought wasn’t good enough, who was actually quite excellent, wasn’t he? And you know? I always thought that you would have been so much happier doing that play, even if it was just okay. Even if it was great, just not the best ever. And maybe, just maybe, it would have been the best ever. You never know. Jessie?

Jessica: Yeah?

Mom: I think she’s a very nice girl.

If all the relationships were this well-crafted, I’d be thrilled with it, but the movie is unfortunately poorly paced an the characters aren’t terribly fleshed out. We cover huge spans of time in minutes, jumping from Helen being embraced by Jessica’s family to them moving in together to Helen complaining that they never have sex to them breaking up because of lack of said sex. It’s a mess, and we don’t really see why Helen is attracted to Jessica in the first place, or why Jessica and her boyfriend would make a good couple, which, for me, makes it a bit of a failure as a romantic comedy.

Clueless

"He does dress better than I do. What would I bring to the relationship?"

When I was ten, I used to watch Clueless all the time on TV. I thought it was totally awesome then, and now that I understand all the jokes, I like it even more. Besides introducing me to Jane Austen, Clueless was the first time I encountered the gay best friend archetype.

Cher, our heroine, pursues Christian, the dreamiest boy in all of Beverly Hills, using tricks straight out of Cosmo (“Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex.”). Christian dresses like a grown-up, calls her “dollface,” listens to Billie Holiday, is knowledgeable about modern art, and brings Spartacus to movie night, and flees from Cher’s advances like a cheetah on fire. Cher is, of course, clueless about Christian’s homosexuality:

Murray: Your man Christian is a cake boy!
Cher, Dionne: A what?
Murray: He's a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde reading, Streissand ticket holding friend of Dorothy, know what I'm saying?
Cher: Uh-uh, no way, not even!
Murray: Yes even, he's gay!
Dionne: He does like to shop, Cher. And the boy can dress.

When Cher realizes that Christian is not a viable boyfriend prospect, they become shopping buddies.

Christian fits the gay best friend movie mold pretty well. Cultured, a little bitchy, sweet to straight girls—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with having one of Cher’s many romantic mishaps involve an obviously, stereotypically, gay guy. The part that makes Christian, and characters like Christian, problematic, is that they never get a date, ever. Their love lives are never given the same attention as the straight friends in movies. Christian’s not even at the final wedding scene, where all the major characters are paired off: Cher with Josh, Dionne with Murray, Tai with Travis, and even the minor villains, Amber and Elton. There’s not any room in the movie for him actually being gay, just jokes about it.