6 Movies | June 21 & 28
To tell a comprehensive history of LGBTQ+ lives on screen would likely take all of June, traditionally the month for Pride celebrations across the world (corresponding to the June 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, generally regarded as the start of the modern gay rights movement). Not that queer people have been highly visible or portrayed with much pride throughout cinema history, far from it. But it would take dozens of films to examine issues of representation, visibility, discrimination and stereotyping the way they’ve been covered in such books as Vito Russo’s landmark 1981 study The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (and the subsequent 1995 documentary based on it) and TCM’s recently released Hollywood Pride by Alonso Duralde.
The 13 movies screening on June 21 and 28 at 8pm provide some significant insight into the evolving approaches to LGBTQ+ characters, themes and stories in motion pictures over the years. The prime-time films in our Hollywood Pride programming will be introduced and discussed each night by TCM host Dave Karger and Duralde.
The first night of programming kicks off with one of the quirkiest movies to come out of 1930s Hollywood, Sylvia Scarlett (1935), in which Katharine Hepburn, for economic and legal purposes, disguises herself as a boy throughout most of the story. She’s not really playing a transgender character, and any “gayness” that crops up is the result of gender confusion played for laughs. In that respect, the film is rather more like the decidedly not-queer Tootsie (1982) than the boldly transgender-focused Tangerine (2015), but it was daring and strange enough in its day to fail miserably with audiences and critics alike. Hepburn was someone who bucked traditional gender roles and appearances, and this personal project for her and her good friend, openly gay director George Cukor, nearly derailed both their careers. Hollywood lore claims that after the disastrous preview, the two contritely approached RKO producer Pandro S. Berman with an offer to do another film for free, and he responded, “Don’t bother.”
Zoom forward nearly four decades and light years ahead for LGBTQ+ films with the TCM premiere of the documentary Gay USA (1977), at the time an unprecedented look at the gay rights movement, galvanized around the anti-gay campaign led by singer and former beauty queen Anita Bryant. The film was shot by about 25 camera operators at Pride events and marches throughout the US and then woven together by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., a pioneer of independent gay cinema. Gary Morris, in Bright Lights Film Journal, called the film “an historic look at a key moment in queer history — pre-AIDS and just before the dawn of modern queer activism — that still resonates today.”
The evening continues with the film adaptation of Harvey Fierstein's Tony Award-winning 1982 play Torch Song Trilogy (1988). The semi-autobiographical story was trimmed down from the stage production's four-hour running time but still managed to retain much of Fierstein's characteristic blend of comedy and pathos. He plays a drag performer who, over the course of a decade, deals with romantic betrayals, the horrifying gay-bashing death of a loved one and a long-simmering confrontation with his disapproving mother (Anne Bancroft).
Real-life drag performers take center stage in the cult favorite documentary The Queen (1968), a mostly sympathetic and understated backstage look at the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant in New York City. Compelling insight into the culture comes out of the participants’ discussions about transgender identity, gender-affirming surgery, the US military draft and performing in drag. The film gets its dramatic tension from the rivalries between the contestants, one of whom, Crystal LaBeija, has been credited as a founder of ball culture (the focus of the later documentary Paris Is Burning, 1990).
Overnight screenings include Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s highly theatrical psycho-drama about a sadistic fashion designer and her relationships with other women, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), considered a classic of New German Cinema. Two Hollywood stars long rumored to have had liaisons with both men and women, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, are featured in, respectively, The Blue Angel (1930) and Queen Christina (1933). As the titular royal in the latter film, Garbo comports herself in masculine clothes, kisses a female courtier and declares she will “die a bachelor.”
The second night of programming opens with Caged (1950), not the first of many women-in-prison movies but generally considered the best of the niche sub-genre, and the implied lesbianism is surprisingly upfront. When innocent Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is sent to prison for a crime her husband committed, she’s taken under the wing of the de facto head of the convicts on her cell block, Kitty (Betty Garde), and told she’ll get out of “the habit” of thinking about men at all. The point hits home when hardened inmate Elvira (Lee Patrick) arrives on the block, proving she’s the most butch over everyone, including the rather masculine warden played by Agnes Moorhead. There’s not much “pride” to be culled from the melodrama, but there are moments of female bonding that are fleetingly tender and sympathetic.
The TCM spotlight may be on "Hollywood Pride," but we step far outside those parameters for Happy Together (1997), recipient of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, where it also brought Best Director honors to Wong Kar-wai. In a contemporary cinematic universe that so frequently renders gay men as white, privileged and relentlessly witty, even in the face of society's ill-treatment of them, Happy Together is refreshing. Our leads, two down-on-their-luck Chinese nationals trying to make a life in Buenos Aires while navigating their toxic relationship, are portrayed with the honesty and complexity not typically applied to queer characters. After a long film history of distortion, derision and negative portrayals, it is not an unreasonable demand that queer characters should be presented in a positive light and that role models should be highly visible on screen. This is not the movie for those seeking that type of representation. While portraying his male couple with great sympathy and insight, Wong nevertheless imbues them with rich, multifaceted personalities, never flinching from showing their moments of thoughtlessness, pettiness and even cruelty. Inspired by Argentine writer Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair, the movie features Hong Kong cinema superstars Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung. The luminous, striking cinematography by Wong's frequent collaborator Christopher Doyle further positioned the film outside the familiar Hollywood aesthetic, although his influence can be seen in mainstream movies from more recent years.
The Pride programming moves into the wee hours with Brokeback Mountain (2005), a breakthrough for gay representation in mainstream American cinema. Ang Lee directed from a script adapted by Diana Ossana and noted contemporary Western writer Larry McMurtry from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx. The film, which follows two ranch hands for hire (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who discover a lifelong romantic and sexual connection, received widespread critical acclaim, appearing on most reviewers' lists of the Top 10 pictures of the year. It was also a commercial hit, bringing in well over 10 times its budget, even in locations not typically amenable to gay stories. Despite this success, and Academy Awards for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay and Original Score, the film lost Best Picture to Crash (2005), a work many critics and audiences found vastly inferior. The controversy has pointed to the continuing marginalization of queer themes. All the same, the movie won numerous awards and nominations and in 2018 was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
Overnight viewers are treated to an eclectic array, starting with the low-budget Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971), considered by some reviewers to be a knock-off of The Boys in the Band (1970). Openly queer Carleton Carpenter, who sang and danced his way through numerous supporting roles in 1950s MGM musicals, turns up in the role of Miss Untouchable. The lesbian romance Desert Hearts (1985) follows. The Criterion Collection said this groundbreaker, produced on a shoestring budget and directed by open lesbian Donna Deitch, “beautifully exudes a sense of tender yearning and emotional candor.” The Pride programming closes with the British New Wave drama A Taste of Honey (1961), featuring actor Murray Melvin as Geoffrey, the female lead’s friend and roommate who is forced out of his parents’ home because of his sexuality.
