From Sissy to Psycho Killer: Hollywood’s Basic Instinct About Gays & Lesbians / Strong Women vs. Gay Men

eye Weekly magazine
April 9, 1992

FROM SISSY TO PSYCHO-KILLER: HOLLYWOOD’S BASIC INSTINCT ABOUT GAYS AND LESBIANS

Twittering sissies, psychopathic fags and icy dykes. Welcome to the pathetic history of lesbian and gay representation in Hollywood. Even though homosexuality has been around longer than prostitution, Hollywood decided early on that it wasn’t a fit subject for film. In the Production Code of 1930, filmmakers were barred from even mentioning the word “homosexual” (or variations thereof), let alone any representations of the beings.

As a result, Hollywood invented a new class, the Sissy, who was obviously meant to represent (with his lisp, foppish clothes and “urban” profession) a gay man. However, because there was not even a hint of the Sissy’s emotional/sexual life, middle America could be fooled into thinking he was just “different.”

And “different” he was. The Sissy represented everything unnatural in sociely. The leading man proves his masculinity by beating him up: the leading woman gets her emotional support from him, until she ditches him for the “real man” at the end. Either way you slice it, Hollywood’s carly gay figures were pathetic, submissive and alone.

Lesbians, of course, didn’t exist (how could they with such masculine guys everywhere?), and so early representations are limited to the masculine presence of Greta Garbo and the innuendo of All About Eve.

Foreign films

In the carly ’60s, the Production Code began a series of amendments to make homosexuality an acceptable screen topic. This had more to do with the pressures of foreign films and domestic experimental productions than Hollywood’s new liberalism. After all, the courts had already ruled that Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising could be shown uncensored: in Europe—particularly England—gay characters were cropping up in mainstream films (A Taste of Honey) which were soon to cross the Atlantic. Hollywood had to compete.

But the censors tagged their new ruling with an ugly proviso: representations of gay and lesbian characters could not “promote homosexuality.” This same absurd language is often used today by American conservatives when they complain that Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs “recruit young men into gay life.” If only it were so easy ...

The result was a new visibility for lesbians and gay men... first as suicidal blackmail victims who either blow their brains out (Advise and Consent, The Children’s Hour) or confused folk who “get cured” after getting a good fuck (Goldfinger, Valley of the Dolls). What a step forward!

Chilling portrait

The first Hollywood film with homosexual central characters was The Boys in the Band (1970), directed by The Exorcist’s William Friedkin. It was a chilling portrait of how Hollywood saw “normal” gay men at the time: self-loathing, nervous and unhappy men who would “love to be straight.” Still, you have to start somewhere.

But instead of following this film up, Hollywood instead found a new role for the gay man: designated serial killer! From Freebie and the Bean (1974) to The Eiger Sanction (1975) and through Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1976), the homos are out for blood. Only (straight) cops can stop their evil mischief. Worst of the bunch was Cruising (1979), in which Al Pacino goes underground in New York’s gay ghetto to find a gay killer. He finds out he, too, is homosexual and so starts a murderous rampage.

The most recent example of this theme—Basic Instinct—is actually less offensive than Cruising because Sharon Stone’s murderousness is not directly linked to her sexuality (as in “Ahhh! I’m queer, I’d better go kill someone!”) and she is identified as a bisexual (who seems to much prefer the company of men anyway). That doesn’t stop the film from being misogynist and deeply dumb, but, in terms of homophobia, it is a minor player.

Painfully sincere

After Cruising and through the 1980s, Hollywood tried to be a little friendlier to its gay and lesbian friends. This change had more to do with gay rights activism—charged by constant urban “gay bashing” and the spectre of AIDS—than Hollywood beneficence.

Unfortunately, the result was fairly putrid cinema: the three most famous products of the decade, Making Love (1982), Personal Best (1984) and Longtime Companion (1989), all presented easily digestible and painfully sincere gays and lesbians in contrived and melodramatic situations. In many ways, these three films were the triumph of gays and lesbians entering Hollywood. A hollow victory indeed.

And Hollywood more than made up for this marginal tolerance by re-inventing ... the Sissy! Check out the Bronson Pinchot’s character in Beverly Hills Cop for an example of the new school of “Isn't this queer a riot, but we’re too liberal to actually call him that. Tee hee.”

Perhaps due to the betrayal of gay voices and the continuing insensitivity of mainstream filmmakers to gay and lesbian concerns (like how many times people call each other “dyke™ and “fag” pejoratively in movies where they could just as castly call each other, I don’t know, “gonad brain”), gay activism in Hollywood exploded in the ’90s.

The new call to arms was sounded upon the release of The Silence of the Lambs (which contains a homophobically portrayed character) in early 1991, and continued through last summer’s filming of Basic Instinct in San Francisco, which was frequently disrupted by Queer Nation activists unhappy with Sharon Stone’s bisexual character.

Now, however, many gay filmmakers and critics (this one included) see the future of gay and lesbian representation in a different light. Since about 1960, North America has had a host of gay directors from Europe present challenging and artistic visions on screen. From Pier Paolo Pasolini to R.W. Fassbinder, Derek Jarman to Pedro Almodóvar, gay representation has been open and uncompromised in some of the best art films ever made.

Also, for the last five years (and in scattered examples before that), gay men and lesbians in North America have also been producing work of great accomplishment—like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and Todd Haynes’s Poison, for a start. So why continue looking to Hollywood—a corrupt and increasingly irrelevant cultural producer—for satisfying images of lesbians and gay men? Strengthen and fund truly independent film production in Canada and the U.S. instead, and queer voices will be heard, Amen.
—Noah Cowan

STRONG WOMEN VS. GAY MEN

Anger about gay and lesbian representation in Hollywood has been brewing for years. But this most recent round, which culminated in the Basic Instinct and Oscar controversies, began in January, 1991, at the memorial service for noted gay film writer Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet).

Larry Kramer, a founder of ACT- UP and one of America’s most controversial AIDS activists, invoked Russo’s memory to denounce Jonathan Demme’s (then just released) The Silence of the Lambs.

It was homophobic, he claimed, because Demme chose to portray his amoral, brutal and sickening serial killer—“Buffalo Bill”—as a gay man. Or, more accurately, as Hollywood’s stereotype of a gay man. Kramer called for a generalized boycott of the film and media con- demnation of Demme and lead actress Jodie Foster.

Kramer failed: the film was a stunning box-office success and will have a place in history after sweep- ing the top Oscar categories.

However, Kramer did manage to prompt several cultural critics to consider his charges. As a result, The Silence of the Lambs offers perhaps the most complex and involved case study of the issues involved in gay and lesbian representation by Hollywood.

The debate played itself out ina special supplement of The Village Voice, in which editor Lisa Kennedy invited nine prominent critics—a mixture of men and women, gay and straight, old and young—to briefly comment on the film.

All the women (including the lesbian critics) thought the film was great; all the gay men thought it was shit. A few people had dissenting opinions, but it was clear the issue was, um, tricky.

Of the gay men, some saw the film as promoting violence against homosexuals (“If all queers are serial killers, they deserve a tire iron in the face”) and promoting a negative self-image for gay men in the audience. Others saw in Bill only a tawdry return to stereotyped Hollywood images of gay men—fluffy poodles, nipple rings, depravity—which may not cause people to go out and “off a homo,” but can’t help matters much.

For the women, any problem with Bill (and some admitted he might be a bit icky) was greatly overshadowed by the astonishing character of Clarice Starling (played by Foster). Here was a woman, unencumbered by the stereotyped “romantic interest” or a (character-building?) sexual assault as the central figure of a major film. She is strong and fiercely competent, without losing any of her nurturing and empathetic side. She is truly the first woman hero—in a genre other than conventional melodrama—brought to a mainstream audience.

Neither side seems to quite get it. Taken in isolation, Bill is a crude gay stereotype and Starling is a feminist dreamboat. But, in standard Hollywood representation, the gay man exists for the straight man to prove his strength—by outwitting and/or killing the pansy. In this film, society’s agent is a woman.

So Demme manages to tear up the old historical scenario; but he replaces it with a chilling new dialectic: strong woman vs. gay stereotypes. This is a dangerous development. Pitting two groups still politically disenfranchised against each other is hardly progress.

Demme’s response to all of this was that the film’s feminism was conscious and that Bill isn’t gay. Says he: “If you don’t understand that this guy isn’t gay, you don’t understand the story. It’s about a man who doesn’t want to be a man, he wants to become as different from himself as he can ... that has nothing to do with being gay.”

Well, yes! Fine! But isn’t Demme asking a lot from Middle America? I can just see Demme leading a tour of Nebraska hicks through the streets of New York: “No, no, no. That guy—with the dress, makeup, poodle and nipple ring—mugging that woman isn’t gay; he is a psychopathic failed transsexual.” I’m not sure the corn huskers will be interested in making that distinction.

Next time, Jonathan, think of the guys, too.
—Noah Cowan