Research 2

Gays in film

An article from Jump Cut, no. 18, August 1978, by Richard Dyer
View: Gays in film

Stand-out quotes -

"Since the gay movement began we have insisted on the centrality of the media (understood in its widest sense) as a carrier, reinforcer or shaper of our oppression"

"Gayness should express itself on film"

"He (Jack Babuscio in Gay News) defines gay sensibility as a creative energy reflecting a consciousness different from the mainstream, a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social oppression"
A second problem is that it is in fact rather hard for an individual sensibility to surface in a film..
.... This is partly because of the sheer numbers of people who work on a film, in an often fragmented and long drawn-out organization of production. Even the director has limited room for manoeuvre. But it is more importantly because any artist in any medium whatsoever is working with a tradition, a set of conventions, which are imbued with meanings that she or he cannot change, and indeed of which she or he is most likely not aware. Even if films did have individual authors, as most "underground" films do, it would still not alter the problem. The author may have any qualities you like; but the cinematic language has connotations and conventions that escape the author."

"THE DETECTIVE (Douglas, 1968). It sets out to be sympathetic, puts a major star (Frank Sinatra) as a liberal defender of gays (in what he says, if not altogether in what he does), and details some of the forms our oppression (and self-oppression) takes. But all the same, it cannot help but reproduce the dominant image of gays"

"the star's unassailable heterosexuality and centrality to the action enforce a narrative function of gay passivity, requiring a straight to act for us"

"in contemporary French cinema there is really little to choose between the lesbian in EMMANUELLE (Jaechlin, l974), an obvious exploitation film"

"women seen only in relation to men, and the lesbianism is there as a facet of the heterosexual worldview. In the case of the first two, the attraction of lesbianism is evoked the better to assert the superiority of heterosexuality"

"The critic (Jack Babuscio) suggests that Dean's gayness informs his three screen roles, giving them "depth," "warmth" and "sensitivity.""

"Dean, quite possibly through his gayness, did help launch a way of being human and male without being particularly "masculine""

"Dean of course had a following, and it was undoubtedly linked to the kind of non-butch image of being a man that he incarnated. It is an image that gay men have been in a particularly good position to imagine and define"

""Gays as ordinary human beings": A very common stance of straight critics, and alas of many within the gay movement.....is that films should show that gay people are just ordinary human beings"

"such assumptions assume that there is no real difference between being gay and being straight. Yet, from a materialist standpoint, gayness is different physically, emotionally and socially from heterosexuality." It is physically different not in the sense of involving different genetic factors (the equivalent sexist argument for the fascist arguments of behavioral psychology) but in the sense of being a different physical activity—two women in bed together is not the same as a man and a woman together or two men. It is different emotionally because it involves two people who have received broadly the same socialization (being both the same gender) and have thus formed their personalities in relation to the same pressures and experiences. It is socially different because it is oppressed."

"I don't wish to imply that we are different in every way from heterosexuals—in terms of aspects of our lives not directly involving relationships, we are, clearly, the same as heterosexuals." Our bodily functions, how we do our work, our intellectual and creative abilities, all these are in no way different from straights … except insofar as they involve relationships. The trouble is of course that they do—so much of life is relationships and even where no physical sexual expression is given to them, the sexual reality of our lives necessarily informs them."

"What this boils down to in terms of films is that if you are representing sexual and emotional relationships on screen, it does make a difference whether they are gay or straight."
"In this way, such domestic dramas of "gay" life are doubly reassuring for the straight audience. They allow this audience to view problems of heterosexuality (which psychologically the audience no doubt needs to) without being shown these problems as rooted in the present structure of heterosexual relationships." The ideal of heterosexuality is preserved when we see how its problems work out so tragically for gays. All this is confirmed by the way straight critics, presented with a similar drama involving heterosexual people "

"Lingering behind much of the criticism of the representation of gays in films is the feeling that it is not real, that it does not show gay people as they really are."

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