Knight at the Movies ARCHIVES
Personal Film Influences:
Celebrating Gay Pride at the Movies
6-23-04 Knight at the Movies column
By Richard Knight, Jr.
When I think about celebrating gay and lesbian pride, I want to do it by watching movies that reflect my own life
(I want to celebrate everything by watching movies come to think of it). Now, as we enter the second century
of cinema there are more and more films with each passing year that hold up the mirror to gay life. Queer
Cinema is slowly becoming other than a subculture and a hip term in the urban lexicon. Though mainstream
Hollywood product still lags far behind the out and proud independents, the visibility of gay and lesbian
characters is ever increasing.
As I noted in my first Knight at the Movies column, The Celluloid Closet is a terrific documentary focusing on the
history of gays and lesbians in the movies. But what’s shocking about it is not just the horribly psychologically
disfiguring ways we’ve been portrayed in the movies – it’s that in the first 100 years of movies there were only
two-dozen or so films that included gays and lesbians at all – closeted or otherwise. The good news is that since
the documentary’s release almost ten years ago, that number has doubled, tripled and shows no sign of abating.
It was not only so.
I remember interviewing Harvey Fierstein in 1985 when his ground breaking Torch Song Trilogy arrived in
movie theatres. I wasn’t out of the closet yet and I stupidly asked him if he was going to keep on making only
movies with a gay subject matter and gay characters! He looked stunned and immediately shot back, “You’d
never ask a straight person anything as offensive as this. I’ve got about a thousand goddamn gay stories in me
left to tell and someday you’re going to thank me for telling them.”
Dear Harvey Fierstein:
Thank you and please forgive me (for that and also asking you another idiot question: where’d you get that low
voice?).
Respectfully,
Richard Knight, Jr.
Mr. Fierstein was right, of course, and now, on the occasion of WCT’s gay pride issue, I think back to the many
films that helped shape my own experience of becoming an out, gay man. Five films that helped turn a timid,
closeted celluloid freak into a…um, less timid, out and proud, celluloid freak:
1. The Wizard Of Oz (1939) I was 12 and lived with my parents and four sisters in the country in western
Nebraska – not a far psychological or geographical distance from Kansas. Did I imagine myself in the gingham
dress? No, but Dorothy’s yearning for something over the rainbow spoke to me – even then I knew, as we all
did, that something was off-kilter and I needed to get my butt out of there. This movie is still the launching pad
for every mixed up, frustrated person, gay or straight. The cornball message, “There’s no place like home” still
can’t be beat. A fabulous Special Edition DVD is a bargain.
2. Funny Girl (1968) Okay, not only was I a big ‘ole Friend Of Dorothy but also a Barbra queen! But stick
with me and notice the developing theme – because here’s another movie that celebrates Different and
Individual and Ugly (read: gay) is Beautiful. When Barbra begs “My Man” to come back and then sloughs off the
depression she spoke volumes as I sat and watched, again with my parents and sisters. I went out the next day
hunting for the soundtrack but couldn’t find it. I settled for Hello Dolly instead. On DVD with a few extras.
3. The Way We Were (1973) More Barbra and more desperate yearning. By this time I was in high school and
writing my first movie review column (guess what it was called?). When Katie sleeps with the drunken,
stumbling Hubbel and then asks tentatively afterward, “Did you know it was me?” little did Barbra know she was
speaking for thousands of gay men and women. Barbra never again had a movie role that spoke to the gay
community so eloquently – she elevated herself into the sludge mainstream hits of A Star Is Born and The Main
Event. Her loss. Sadly, Streisand did not participate in the DVD commentary.
4. Death Trap (1982) Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, Hollywood’s hottest leading man, starred in this
not very good mystery based on a hit play. I’d never seen it so when Reeve suddenly turned and kissed Caine on
the mouth(!) it was ten times more powerful than the chest bursting scene in Alien. It’s affect on the audience
was just as intense – people booed and screamed “faggots” and immediately walked out of the theatre. My
sister and I sat there and I slunk down in my seat. I desperately wanted to see Making Love with Harry Hamlin
and Michael Ontkean, which opened the same year but didn’t dare go to a theatre. It purportedly showed two
gay men OPEN MOUTH KISSING and tumbling into bed together. No self-respecting person would see that
garbage my mother told me. Sigh. No extras on the Death Trap DVD, Making Love yet to be released in that
format.
5. The Hunger (1983) What a difference a year makes! My best friend and I decided that WE were the
vampire couple portrayed by Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in Tony Scott’s first film. We loved Bauhaus,
inhabited all the punk clubs, and dressed to the new wave nines. We were determined to pick up another couple
and do the deed just like “Miriam” and “John” but alas, Kim was straight and wasn’t much interested in any
Deneuve-Susan Sarandon action and Bowie had already morphed from the bi-sexual Ziggy Stardust into that
mainstream blonde “Let’s Dance” goose stepping guy so the fantasy just kinda fell apart – like the brief, intense
romance we shared. I still think Deneuve’s seduction of Sarandon (and their subsequent lovemaking) is one of
filmdom’s sensual heights – bloodsucking and all. Not yet available on DVD but forthcoming later this year. This
is the movie and the relationship that made me a confirmed homosexual bachelor – until Jimmy (in 1997).
5. Maurice (1987) While seeing the breakthrough Merchant-Ivory success A Room With A View in 1986, I
routinely replaced pouty Helena Bonham Carter with myself as she was romanced by sexy Julian Sands. Earlier
in the movie he’d shared a very homoerotic swimming hole scene that had full frontal nudity (gasp!) with Rupert
Graves, who played Carter’s brother. Having Merchant-Ivory take on a gay subject (with Hugh Grant, no less)
in Maurice was cultured fag nirvana and I saw the movie NINE times. I loved how Grant and James Wilby
cuddled and barely kissed – it was so pristine and nice and white. When Wilby finally (finally!) gets it on with
Graves (as the “underkeeper” on the big estate) it was like WASP meets rough trade. Subconsciously I knew by
this point that the two leads were actor – no two men I knew ever really kissed or touched that way. Ah well.
Recently released by Home Vision Entertainment in a comprehensive, two-disk Special Edition that’s a must for
us shoosh queens.
6. Parting Glances (1986) I saw this not long before Bill Sherwood, it’s writer/director died from AIDS. Talk
about another tragic waste of talent! This was the first gay movie I saw where I recognized characters from my
own life. It takes place in New York as a gay couple are about to be parted for an extended period while one of
them (the hunky Richard Ganoung) is working on a job in Africa. Funny, sad, and offbeat, it features a terrific,
multi-ethnic and multi-sexual cast (including Steve Buscemi and Kathy Kinney) that remains fresh today.
Available on a bare bones, expensive DVD that deserves a Special Edition release. I date the beginning of Queer
Cinema with this movie. It coincided with my own arrival into Gayville, USA.
The day after I saw Parting Glances for the first time in the late 80s (on Showtime – which even then
programmed whatever gay and lesbian fare was available) I marched in the Pride Parade with Act Up.
How’s that for queer as film?
Celebrating Gay Pride at the Movies
6-23-04 Knight at the Movies column
By Richard Knight, Jr.
When I think about celebrating gay and lesbian pride, I want to do it by watching movies that reflect my own life
(I want to celebrate everything by watching movies come to think of it). Now, as we enter the second century
of cinema there are more and more films with each passing year that hold up the mirror to gay life. Queer
Cinema is slowly becoming other than a subculture and a hip term in the urban lexicon. Though mainstream
Hollywood product still lags far behind the out and proud independents, the visibility of gay and lesbian
characters is ever increasing.
As I noted in my first Knight at the Movies column, The Celluloid Closet is a terrific documentary focusing on the
history of gays and lesbians in the movies. But what’s shocking about it is not just the horribly psychologically
disfiguring ways we’ve been portrayed in the movies – it’s that in the first 100 years of movies there were only
two-dozen or so films that included gays and lesbians at all – closeted or otherwise. The good news is that since
the documentary’s release almost ten years ago, that number has doubled, tripled and shows no sign of abating.
It was not only so.
I remember interviewing Harvey Fierstein in 1985 when his ground breaking Torch Song Trilogy arrived in
movie theatres. I wasn’t out of the closet yet and I stupidly asked him if he was going to keep on making only
movies with a gay subject matter and gay characters! He looked stunned and immediately shot back, “You’d
never ask a straight person anything as offensive as this. I’ve got about a thousand goddamn gay stories in me
left to tell and someday you’re going to thank me for telling them.”
Dear Harvey Fierstein:
Thank you and please forgive me (for that and also asking you another idiot question: where’d you get that low
voice?).
Respectfully,
Richard Knight, Jr.
Mr. Fierstein was right, of course, and now, on the occasion of WCT’s gay pride issue, I think back to the many
films that helped shape my own experience of becoming an out, gay man. Five films that helped turn a timid,
closeted celluloid freak into a…um, less timid, out and proud, celluloid freak:
1. The Wizard Of Oz (1939) I was 12 and lived with my parents and four sisters in the country in western
Nebraska – not a far psychological or geographical distance from Kansas. Did I imagine myself in the gingham
dress? No, but Dorothy’s yearning for something over the rainbow spoke to me – even then I knew, as we all
did, that something was off-kilter and I needed to get my butt out of there. This movie is still the launching pad
for every mixed up, frustrated person, gay or straight. The cornball message, “There’s no place like home” still
can’t be beat. A fabulous Special Edition DVD is a bargain.
2. Funny Girl (1968) Okay, not only was I a big ‘ole Friend Of Dorothy but also a Barbra queen! But stick
with me and notice the developing theme – because here’s another movie that celebrates Different and
Individual and Ugly (read: gay) is Beautiful. When Barbra begs “My Man” to come back and then sloughs off the
depression she spoke volumes as I sat and watched, again with my parents and sisters. I went out the next day
hunting for the soundtrack but couldn’t find it. I settled for Hello Dolly instead. On DVD with a few extras.
3. The Way We Were (1973) More Barbra and more desperate yearning. By this time I was in high school and
writing my first movie review column (guess what it was called?). When Katie sleeps with the drunken,
stumbling Hubbel and then asks tentatively afterward, “Did you know it was me?” little did Barbra know she was
speaking for thousands of gay men and women. Barbra never again had a movie role that spoke to the gay
community so eloquently – she elevated herself into the sludge mainstream hits of A Star Is Born and The Main
Event. Her loss. Sadly, Streisand did not participate in the DVD commentary.
4. Death Trap (1982) Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, Hollywood’s hottest leading man, starred in this
not very good mystery based on a hit play. I’d never seen it so when Reeve suddenly turned and kissed Caine on
the mouth(!) it was ten times more powerful than the chest bursting scene in Alien. It’s affect on the audience
was just as intense – people booed and screamed “faggots” and immediately walked out of the theatre. My
sister and I sat there and I slunk down in my seat. I desperately wanted to see Making Love with Harry Hamlin
and Michael Ontkean, which opened the same year but didn’t dare go to a theatre. It purportedly showed two
gay men OPEN MOUTH KISSING and tumbling into bed together. No self-respecting person would see that
garbage my mother told me. Sigh. No extras on the Death Trap DVD, Making Love yet to be released in that
format.
5. The Hunger (1983) What a difference a year makes! My best friend and I decided that WE were the
vampire couple portrayed by Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in Tony Scott’s first film. We loved Bauhaus,
inhabited all the punk clubs, and dressed to the new wave nines. We were determined to pick up another couple
and do the deed just like “Miriam” and “John” but alas, Kim was straight and wasn’t much interested in any
Deneuve-Susan Sarandon action and Bowie had already morphed from the bi-sexual Ziggy Stardust into that
mainstream blonde “Let’s Dance” goose stepping guy so the fantasy just kinda fell apart – like the brief, intense
romance we shared. I still think Deneuve’s seduction of Sarandon (and their subsequent lovemaking) is one of
filmdom’s sensual heights – bloodsucking and all. Not yet available on DVD but forthcoming later this year. This
is the movie and the relationship that made me a confirmed homosexual bachelor – until Jimmy (in 1997).
5. Maurice (1987) While seeing the breakthrough Merchant-Ivory success A Room With A View in 1986, I
routinely replaced pouty Helena Bonham Carter with myself as she was romanced by sexy Julian Sands. Earlier
in the movie he’d shared a very homoerotic swimming hole scene that had full frontal nudity (gasp!) with Rupert
Graves, who played Carter’s brother. Having Merchant-Ivory take on a gay subject (with Hugh Grant, no less)
in Maurice was cultured fag nirvana and I saw the movie NINE times. I loved how Grant and James Wilby
cuddled and barely kissed – it was so pristine and nice and white. When Wilby finally (finally!) gets it on with
Graves (as the “underkeeper” on the big estate) it was like WASP meets rough trade. Subconsciously I knew by
this point that the two leads were actor – no two men I knew ever really kissed or touched that way. Ah well.
Recently released by Home Vision Entertainment in a comprehensive, two-disk Special Edition that’s a must for
us shoosh queens.
6. Parting Glances (1986) I saw this not long before Bill Sherwood, it’s writer/director died from AIDS. Talk
about another tragic waste of talent! This was the first gay movie I saw where I recognized characters from my
own life. It takes place in New York as a gay couple are about to be parted for an extended period while one of
them (the hunky Richard Ganoung) is working on a job in Africa. Funny, sad, and offbeat, it features a terrific,
multi-ethnic and multi-sexual cast (including Steve Buscemi and Kathy Kinney) that remains fresh today.
Available on a bare bones, expensive DVD that deserves a Special Edition release. I date the beginning of Queer
Cinema with this movie. It coincided with my own arrival into Gayville, USA.
The day after I saw Parting Glances for the first time in the late 80s (on Showtime – which even then
programmed whatever gay and lesbian fare was available) I marched in the Pride Parade with Act Up.
How’s that for queer as film?
Four films that helped me to become a happy homosexual
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