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The dead, gay stereotype
A recent discussion about an episode of Smallville brought up the "dead!evil!gay stereotype" and what, exactly, it was (Fans of Buffy may remember similar discussions from when Tara died and Willow went evil).

The discussion prompted me to check The Celluloid Closet out of the library. I'd seen the documentary many times before but I'd never had the chance to read the book.

And let me stop right here and say that if you are a fan of slash, the book and movie should be on your required reading/viewing list. They chronicle the history of gays in the movies and, amongst other things, point out that we slash fans are not insane. The subtext is there on purpose. Read the book and watch the documentary (often shown on Bravo) both. Reason being, they were done about a decade apart, so the documentary covers movies that weren't out when the book was written, but on the flip side the book goes into greater depth on some topics than the movie could manage.

Anyway, as I promised in the thread I tried to find some good examples of the dead/evil gay/lesbian stereotype and honestly it was hard. Not because of a lack of examples, but because there were too many. I can't isolate a single quote - or even two - as the definititve statement on the subject.



First off, you may want to read Roger Ebert's review of the documentary, which highlights why the movie should be a must-view for every slash fan, but also contains the following quote:

``The Celluloid Closet'' is inspired by a 1981 book by Vito Russo, who wrote as a gay man who found he had to look in the shadows and subtexts of movies to find the homosexual characters who were surely there. His book was a compendium of visible and concealed gays in the movies, and now this documentary, which shows the scenes he could only describe, makes it clear Hollywood wanted it both ways: It benefitted from the richness that gays added to films, but didn't want to acknowledge their sexuality. In those few films that were frankly about gays, their lives almost always ended in madness or death (there is a montage of gays dying onscreen, of which my favorite from a Freudian point of view is Sandy Dennis as a lesbian in ``The Fox,'' crushed by a falling tree). (Emphasis mine)

From the book:

Twice before, plays of [Tennessee] Williams had been brought to the screen with significant homosexual references deleted. [...] In 1951 the "problem" that Blanche DuBois encountered with her husband was obscured for the screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire; in 1958 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was shorn of the homosexual implications in the relationshp between Bric (Paul Newman) and the dead Skipper. [...] Then, in 1959, [...] Suddenly Last Summer dealt with the subject as the kind of psychosexual freak show that the Fifties almost demanded. Treated like a dread disease, the homosexuality of Sebastian Venable, William's doomed poet, could be 'inferred but not shown' - by special permission of the Breen Office. [...] The Legion of Decency, after seeing that the necessary cuts were made, gave the film a special classification: "Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversion." [...] Williams' tortured view of a failed homosexual artist and the people he victimizes with his abnormal desires is a classic horror story. Having used first his mother, in this case literally his mad creator, and then his cousin (Elizabeth Taylor) as bait for his affairs, the creature is finally destroyed by an angry mob ov street urchins in a climax not much different from that of James Whale's Frankenstein, in which the peasants pursue the monster to the top of a hill, where fire engulfs him.

[TBQ's note: in case my cutting here doesn't make it clear, the book's point is that Williams had blatent homosexuality in many of his plays, but the only time that homosexuality was allowed to make it to the screen was the one play which kills off the gay character in a horrible fashion.]

***

[After the new Code created in 1962]

For most people, homosexuality was inextricably bound to the idea of men acting like women - and that was bad, even dangerous, for heroes. Although, under the new Code, villainous homosexuals sometimes wanted the hero sexually, their homosexuality served as an illustration of their pathology and thus illuminated their villainy. In Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (1062), the fatal attraction of Claggart (Robert Ryan) to the beauteous innocence of Billy (Terence Stamp) is both his problem and his eventual retribution.

***

[re: The Children's Hour, starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine]

But tin the character of Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) Hellman created the sudden revelation that comes to a woman who discovers the truth of her own lesbianism by means of a child's stupid lie. That self-revelation costs Martha Dobie her life - the first in a long series of suicides of homosexual screen characters.

***

Advise and Consent (1962) - Contains one of the first shots of a gay bar in a film. The character of Senator Brig Anderson (Don Murray) has a homosexual encounter in his army past with a fellow soldier anmed Ray (John Granger). ray blackmails Anderson and, after a confrontation, "Anderson speeds back to Washington, locks himself in his oak-paneled Senate office and slits his throat with a straight razor."

***

Thirteen years later, in Max Baer's Ode to Billy Joe (1976), [..] Billy Joe McAllister (Robby Benson) suffers a similar fate [...] When Billy Joe jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge because he had "been with a man - a sin against God and nature," his secret dies with him.

***

[Regarding Walk on the Wild Side (1962), starring Barbara Stanwyck)]

Stanwyck's Jo was the opposite of MacLaine's Martha, a villain, not a victim. Jo's acceptance of her own lesbianism is part of her villainy. Any decent woman would kill herself , as Martha and Brig did[...]

***

When gays became real, they became threatening. The new sissies departed radically from their gentle ancestors; the dykes became predatory and dangerous. Lesbians were still creatures to be conquered or defeated, but now viciously so, as though they were other men. [...] the comic stereotype became a useful tool for putting homosexuality back in its place. As object lessons, officially defined as the opposite of normal, sissies and dykes throughout the 1960s were a nasty lot even when they were funny. They exhibited an abundance of the "meanness" [...]

Popular sex farces and James Bond spy thrillers used sissies and dykes to prove the virility of cartoon heroes an to stress the sterility of homosexuality. Crowther, reviewing Goldfinger for the New York Times, identified the super-masculine post of James Bond as "what we're now calling homosexual sarcasm." There was plenty of froom for sarcasm. In From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), cartoon dykes are alternately killed and cured in the grand tradition of hererosexual solutions. In the former, Lotte Lenya's Colonel Roasa Kelb is old, snakelike, dangerous; a killer spy who makes cobra eyes at a young blonde agent [...] Bond's castration is prevented when Klebb is shot to death by the pretty young thing she had tried to seduce. In Goldfinger, Bond conqueres the beautiful Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), a lesbian doll who comes to life complete with a coterie of beautiful Amazons. [...]

Lesbians who were of use in the service of male sexuality were those beautiful young women who could be variously defined to serve the fantasies of make conquest. Old crows like Rosa Klebb were messily dispatched, along with homosexual men and any other challenge to a James Bond hero. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Kidd (Putter Smith), two gay lovers who are not to be found in the novel Diamonds Are Forever, appear in the 1971 film version as gleeful killers. The pair even get to walk hand in hand into the sunset after they have blown up a helicopter. In the end, though, they are set aflame and toasted like the two marshmallows they really are

***

Gays dropped like flies in the Sixties, and for as many reasons as there were tragedies. Sometimes the sexuality of lesbians or crazed gay men victimized others, threatening the status quo; sometimes it caused self-hatred enough to make them suicidal. Either way, the fray was thick with dead bodies and few escaped to the relative safety of the closet. The question, as it applied to the portrayal of gays at the end of the 1960s, became one of visibility. Overt, active or predatory gays - including some particularly nasty sissies who would have been harmless thirty years before - were killed off. The repressed, tormented types usually committed suicide, and the scattered cases were "cured" by sufficient attention from the oposite sex. Obvious cartoons were spared when they happened to be passing through only to provide color or to present a strong contrast to a sexy hero. Pathetic, lonely old lesbians were preserved if they were not wearing spiked shoes. Survivial was an option only for nontheratening characters, and almost all homosexuals threatened the heterosexual status quo by their very existence.

***

And at this point yours truly is starting to go cross-eyed from reading and typing, but lemme just quote these before I stop (and note these aren't the last mentioned in the book by a long shot, just the last ones I'm quoting):

In Freebie and the Bean (1974), a transvestite killer (Christopher Morley) is cornered by James Caan in a ladies room for a fight to the finish. After getting in a few licks, he gets splattered against the walls - as much for assuming male agression as for assuming female attire.

In The Eiger Sanction (1975), Jack Cassicy plays a killer fairy who can "change a nine dollar bill in threes" and has a despicable little dog named Faggot. Cassidy is left to die in the desert, though the pooch is saved (lest the film be accused of cruelty to animals).

In Theatre of Blood (1973), Robert Morley plays a homosexual theater critc who dies when he is forced to eat his two poodles, who have been baked in a pie in the same fashion that a Roman empress's two sons were served to her in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. In Play It as it Lays, despondant film producer Tony Perkins dies in star Lady Tuesday Weld's arms after swallowing a handful of sleeping pills. She understands. Other gays died violent deaths in The Day of the Jackal (1973), Swashbuckler (1976), The Laughing Policeman (1973), Busting (1974), Drum (1976) and The Betsy (1978)

And, finally, because I thought this might be of interest to Bonibaru who asked about gays as villains vs modern movies that use Brits as villians:

In 1968, Time speculated that Hollywood was "using" homosexuality more and more as a subject because it had "run out of conventional bad guys" and the evidence bears this out.



Whew. Okay, now that I've got that typed out, I'll get started on a few essays re: do Willow and Tara bear out the dead!evil!gay stereotype, and how does Wes factor in to all this. =)