Gays to the Fore, Cautiously

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Several new releases try a freer portrayal of homosexuality

"There's nothing more inconvenient than an old queen with a head cold," Toddy sniffles as he contemplates being down and out in Paris, 1934. He has just lost his job in a gay nightclub, his lover has left him, and his new roommate, Victoria (Julie Andrews), is a singer with a voice that can shatter glass but not the indifference of booking agents.

Toddy, who is played with great good spirit by Robert Preston, speaks too soon. For the old queen is anything but an object of pity. Since his new pal looks so dapper in the suit she borrows from him after her clothes have been ruined in a rainstorm, he shrewdly conceives the idea of having her become a female female impersonator: in other words, a woman who plays a man playing women.

Things get really delirious when James Garner, as a determinedly heterosexual gangster from Chicago, falls for her/him. "I'm not a man!" she cries when he finally embraces her. "I don't care if you are," he replies. As he squires her around, the world is bound either to mistake him for a homosexual or learn the truth about her, which will destroy a very promising career. To further complicate matters, the gangster's bodyguard (sweetly played by former Detroit Lions Tackle Alex Karras), encouraged by what he takes to be a conversion by his master, comes out of the closet and starts an affair with the ever amiable Toddy.

In short, by the end of Victor/ Victoria, Writer-Director Blake Edwards ("10," The Pink Panther series) has managed to overturn virtually all his characters' sexual roles and the audience's expectations as well. He has also made, in the midst of much well-timed farce, a fairly serious point: namely that sexual identities have precious little to do with the qualities, moral and otherwise, that make people good, attractive or fun to be with.

Besides being perhaps the most entertaining American comedy since the last Edwards film (S.O.B.), Victor/Victoria adds further proof that, like Toddy in the film, homosexuals are ceasing to be an inconvenience to moviemakers. Already out and doing quite well in the theaters is Making Love, in which a terribly nice fellow (Michael Ontkean) leaves his terribly nice wife (Kate Jackson) to take up with a not-quite-so-nice novelist (Harry Hamlin) before he finds a more stable male mate. Also doing well is Personal Best, which purposely makes no big deal about the fact that its two leading figures (played by Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly) indulge in a lesbian affair while pursuing their careers as Olympic-level track athletes.

Making Love is a case of the bland leading what its creators consider to be the blind. Says Director Arthur Hiller of his highly sanitized love scenes: "We weren't trying to say this is how gays make love. This is terribly new for most of the country, so you must lead them into it gently." As for Personal Best, Writer-Director Robert Towne has come to resent his film's identification as a gay tract. "The name of the movie is not 'Personal Fruit.' There are two minutes of lovemaking and an hour of competition in it, and as far as I know, sex between any genders has not yet qualified as an Olympic event."

Also appearing in the theaters this week is the adaptation of the hit Broadway show Deathtrap, in which homosexuality is used more to give a sharp twist to the first-act ending than as prime subject matter, though at one Los Angeles screening someone cried out at the sight of Michael Caine kissing Co-Star Christopher Reeve, "Say it isn't so, Superman!" This spring will bring Partners, about a gay policeman (John Hurt) and a straight one (Ryan O'Neal) who set up housekeeping in the Los Angeles homosexual community in order to entrap a murderer who is preying on it. Like all the other pictures in what looks suspiciously like a trend, it reportedly shows homosexuality neutrally, as just another fact one is likely to encounter while stumbling through modern life.

If this is the way gays are going to be portrayed in films, it represents real progress from the prissy sissies played by the likes of Franklin Pangborn and Grady Sutton 40 or 50 years ago, and from the self-tortured gays of The Boys in the Band and the monsters of Cruising, among more recent characterizations. Some observers liken the new gay movies to the Sidney Poitier period pieces about blacks: necessary non-evils designed to disarm the middle-class public by stressing a minority group's similarities to it as a (possible) prelude to more eccentric and individualistic portrayals. For the moment, at least, that is the way gays prefer to see these pictures. Says Lucia Valeska, executive director of the National Gay Task Force: "If gayness is seen not as a deviant life-style but as something that happens to a lot of people, this can only be positive for us."

There is, however, something more at stake here than sexual politics. The new films about gays have so far refused to acknowledge that sexual outlook has an influence on aesthetics. We would not expect a celibate straight director to make a film indistinguishable from that of a celebrated roue. No more should a film by or about gays look as though it was financed by the ACLU. Indeed, in modern popular culture there is no more distinctive aesthetic than the gay one. As defined by Canadian Critic Lawrence O'Toole, it includes a taste for grand romantic gestures, excesses of "spirit, personality and desire" and "a refusal to apologize for outlandish behavior." This spirit, O'Toole argues, informed the mannered and stylized American comedies, musicals and romances of the '30s and '40s, many of which are now considered classics. These days he finds it notably lacking. Of the current crop, Victor/ Victoria perhaps aspires to some of it, though the musical numbers unfortunately miss the oldtime zip and fizz.

Just as the freedom to bring all of heterosexuality's nasty little secrets out of the closet has robbed our films of romantic tension and symbolic inventiveness, it may be that open, but rather middle-class portrayals of homosexuality will also exact their subtle costs. It is hard to imagine any American in the near future achieving the intensely ironic and utterly riveting self-awareness (and occasional self-disgust) of German Director Frank Ripploh in Taxi Zum Klo. And just as well too, many would argue. Movies, like the rest of society, are just beginning to move beyond the notion that homosexuality is an illness rather than a choice. Some people will never make that leap. Or abandon their understandable concern that gay love affairs, depicted by role-model movie stars, may have a baneful influence on the impressionable young. We are, therefore, a long way from being able to portray the infinite range of other choices within the larger homosexual choice. But within the past decade some kind of beginning has been made. It was time, at last, for American movies to recognize that simple fact, however simplistically they have done so.

--By Richard Schickel. Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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