Sexual fluidity
2001-05-04 07:24
These days movies aren't getting gayer, but they've got men kissing each
other. Is this just a movie fad, a sign of the times, a reflection of a
greater sexual tolerance in audiences or a sinister gay conspiracy? I don't
know, but in movies like Dude, Where's My Car?, Groove and Chuck And Buck,
guys pucker up for the camera and they're not gay. It's just a harmless
little gender-bending on the side.
Even Greg, in the TV series Dharma And Greg, in the episode in which he goes
to the army, gets a whopping kiss from his best mate, a wet smooch sent to
him by Dharma. And - horrors! - in an openly gay movie like The Broken
Hearts Club, a hetero-stalwart like Frasier's no-nonsense dad, aka John
Mahoney, dons a dress and does a drag cabaret. In an episode of Frasier, he
pretends to be gay.
Are these movies and series subversive, punting a kind of pan-sexuality?
Probably.
The idea of the man-to-man kiss is to break sexual rules, and if
the character's sympathetic, you're supposed to root for him doing it. Even
in the local drama series Isidingo - OK, soapie - there's a gay guy out of
the closet, and an episode ends with him about to kiss one of the straight
characters who, gasp, is about to respond. Cut. Watch next week.
Sexual fluidity, rather than purely gay sex, is, I think, a fairly recent
movie phenomenon. Gay and lesbian film festivals helped pave the way for gay
movies. In mainstream movies being gay's mostly a traumatic business in need
of repentance. Or they bang politically correct drums, suggesting you can be
glad to be gay if movie stars like Tom Selleck, Kevin Kline and Phillip
Seymour Hoffman don't mind doing it. In a move like Flawless, a phlegmatic,
oh-so-straight cop comes to admire a drag queen.
I guess allowing some same-gender kissing even if it's, so to say, tongue in
cheek, is the next step. I don't know how US audiences react, but tolerance
here's often a matter of geography. Audiences in Johannesburg don't worry,
but in nearby Pretoria I've heard a collective gasp when two guys smack
lips. And some tut-tuts of disapproval. Johannesburg audiences tend to
snicker and giggle.
There was a time when sexual roles in Hollywood were pretty well defined. H.
Paul Jeffers notes in his biography Sal Mineo: His Life, Murder And Mystery,
that there was a scripted, gender-bending kiss between Mineo and James Dean
in the famous observatory scene in Rebel Without A Cause (1955).
It was cut,
but that didn't prevent Mineo, homosexual in real life, saying he created
the first gay teenager in movies. Perhaps, but according to Vito Russo's The
Celluloid Closet, movies used various codes and signifiers to suggest gay
since they began.
In those days, too, movie magazines and gossip columnists insisted on strict
sexual segregation. Mineo had to date a succession of starlets to hide the
fact that he was gay. And, of course, the case of Rock Hudson's sham
marriage to Phyllis Cates is well-known. He had to get married, or be
exposed as homosexual by gossip magazines that were, after he did the
nuclear family thing, prepared to accept a trade-off and run stories on
another star, Rory Calhoun's jail sentence. All very sordid.
Gossip magazines need sexual barriers otherwise they wouldn't have stories.
Legendary gossip columnists like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper were
really old vultures who preyed on other people. They'd have probably had a
field day with Ellen DeGeneres coming out. And same sex kisses in movies.
These days there's talk of a greater sexual tolerance, and there is - to an
extent. Sexuality is still a matter of categories. Gay movies are labelled
that, and kept from the mainstream. When guys kiss in movies like Dude,
Where's My Car, it's fleeting, a bit of silliness. They're also send-ups of
big screen romantic kisses.
Sex, too, is still a major seller for reactionary tabloids, showing that
sexual taboos are still pretty powerful. However, if one part of the media
has closed down sexual freedom, another part has opened it up to an extent:
advertising. Sure, some adverts are sexist and punt a vulgar, phony
sexuality. But they've also created a kind of pansexual climate that allows
for sexual fluidity.
When those guys kiss, they do chip away at sexual respectability and
barriers and we buy it literally, I think, because all the ads in the
shopping mall have prepared us for it. Nowadays, Mineo would probably have
been an openly gay star and promoted Calvin Klein underwear - before he was
murdered he was about to pose naked for Playgirl, the female equivalent of
Playboy.
I don't know what James Dean would have done, though, but his ghost lives on
in every one who wears white t-shirts and jeans, and he didn't even have one
gender-bending kiss on screen.
The top five movie according to the Cinema Noveau art house circuit are:
1. Buttefly's Tongue
2. Chocolat
3. Soft Fruit
4. Under The Sun
5. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon