Word: closets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hardly, as a spiffy new documentary, The Celluloid Closet, amply demonstrates. For nearly a century, Hollywood has done a shoddy, often slanderous job of showing what it is like to be homosexual. Adroitly assembled by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, with narration written by Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) and read by Lily Tomlin, Celluloid Closet is by turns funny and poignant. It interlaces old clips (for instance, a peignoired Cary Grant declaring, in Bringing Up Baby, "I just went gay all of a sudden!") with cogent commentary by Gore Vidal, Harvey Fierstein and others. It should be getting...
...movies, as commentators of every political stripe have noted, are a glamorous mirror of society. Growing up, we all find ourselves, in part, by finding aspects of ourselves onscreen. Gays didn't. "You feel like a ghost," essayist Susie Bright (author of Sexwise) says in The Celluloid Closet, "a ghost that nobody believes in." So gays went looking for kinship in any movie character who was artistic, flamboyant, wounded. They still do, and some of the subtextual readings in The Celluloid Closet result in eyestrain. "We know the Sal Mineo character in Rebel Without a Cause is gay," asserts British...
...Celluloid Closet tells us things are better now. But that is mainly on the independent scene, where nobody's betting real money. In the films most people see, gays are still crippled in some way. Tom Hanks can be the good, dying gay man in Philadelphia--but no passionate kiss for your boyfriend, please. In the thriller Copycat, the gay character is not the serial killer, he is the heroine's best friend--but he still gets murdered. And gay baiting is still acceptable; "faggot" remains the epithet du jour of movie machismo. In Mel Gibson's Braveheart, early line...
...that Hollywood, with its dozens of gay stars, its hundreds of gays in positions of creative and executive power, is afraid to depict homosexual life--the world it knows and could persuasively dramatize. The whole town, timid as ever, prefers to reside in one huge, beautifully appointed celluloid closet. Or a gilded birdcage with a cover over it. The world looks safe and cozy from inside. Why would anyone want to come...
...empty beer, bottles are in the closet, so hopefully no one will want to hang up their coat," he said...