Philadelphia (TriStar Pictrures, Clinica Estetico, 1993)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 7:15 I put on Turner Classic Movies so my husband Charles and I could watch a couple of interesting movies about various kinds of social prejudice. One was the 1993 AIDS movie Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks in his first of two back-to-back Academy Award-winning roles as hot-shot Philadelphia attorney Andrew “Andy” Beckett, who unbeknownst to anybody at work is a Gay man who contracts AIDS. He is fired from his job, ostensibly because of incompetence – he allegedly misplaced an important complaint just an hour and 15 minutes before it had to be filed or the statute of limitations would run out, and mysteriously both the hard copy he printed out and the file fromhis computer (Charles chuckled at the ancient monochrome CRT display monitor on his computer) disappear and eventually the hard copy turns up in a room full of completed case files – but Andy is convinced that he’s really being set up to be fired because he has AIDS. Andy wants to sue for wrongful termination, claiming that he was covered by a U.S. Supreme Court decision preventing people with disabilities from being fired if they can still do the work, but he approaches nine lawyers to represent him and all turn him down. In desperation, Andy calls on Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), a so-called “TV lawyer,” an ambulance chaser whose TV commercials have made him ubiquitous around Philadelphia. At first Miller doesn’t want to take the case, either, and he makes it clear that his own hatred of Queer people is one of the reasons. But eventually Miller takes the case after he runs into Andy in a public law library and sees an officious clerk try to get Andy into a private room because he can see Andy’s KS lesions (for some reason KS – short for Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of skin cancer – generally appeared only in Gay and Bisexual men who got AIDS, not in other people who contracted the syndrome) and is worried their patrons can, too – and this gets through to Miller on a personal level. Not so much so that Miller isn’t revolted when a young Gay Black law student comes on to him in a supermarket, apparently assuming that Miller wouldn’t be representing a Gay plaintiff in an anti-discrimination lawsuit if he weren’t Gay himself. Miller responds by threatening to beat the guy up, and it’s only after Miller leaves that we see the young man throwing a football up and down, as if to say, “Maybe I’m Gay, but I’m still more athletic than you.”

There’s also a scene in which Andy takes Miller to a Gay party (where Michael Callen’s a cappella group The Flirtations are doing their cover of the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman,” though alas director Jonathan Demme did not include the song’s second chorus with its famous punch line, “And lots of wavy hair like Liberace,” which took on a quite different meaning when the song was sung by Gay men after Liberace’s own AIDS diagnosis had dragged him out of the closet at last) and he’s the proverbial fish out of water. When I first saw Philadelphia I watched it with my then-partner John Gallagher on a rented VHS tape and I didn’t care for it; I thought it was way too didactic and I dreaded the scene a Gay friend of mine had warned me about in which, he said, Tom Hanks “flounced” around the set while playing Denzel Washington an opera record. When I finally saw the film I loved that scene; it was the sort of conversation I’ve had myself many times in which I’ve tried to explain what I love about opera to someone who has no ear for it and doesn’t see why anybody would listen to all this singing in languages they don’t understand. This time around I did think Tom Hanks overacted the scene (especially given that Hanks’s stock-in-trade as an actor is Spencer Tracy-esque naturalism), but it’s still the one part of the movie where director Demme and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner gave Andy Beckett some dimensionality instead of making him just a stick-figure victim. When I first saw Philadelphia I found myself wishing that Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington had switched roles. With his experience ini situation comedies on TV Hanks would have been far more believable as the clownish “TV lawyer” figure he starts the film as, and with his more serious mien Washington would have been better as the person with AIDS, especially since he could have been drawn as someone who had reached the top rung of the legal profession despite the dual, disadvantage of being Black and Gay. But Nyswaner was trying to create, not a character with depth in his own right, but a poster child for AIDS awareness, and given the political and social atmosphere of 1993 the AIDS poster child couldn’t have been Black. It had to be a straight white guy playing a Gay white guy with an ample extended family who supported him and had long since accepted his Gayness as O.K.

Demme even added to his imprimatur by casting Joanne Woodward, of all people, as his mother – and Jason Robards, Jr. as his tormentor at the law firm, the partner responsible for firing him, who boasts proudly that during his stint in the Navy he and his fellow sailors in the Navy had targeted a Gay guy aboard ship by shoving his head into a latrine after they all had just used it. One thing watching Philadelphia again 28 years after it was made was it brought back the sheer terror of AIDS at a time wh en a diagnosis of it was literally a death sentence. I have grim memories of the time during which the news that you had AIDS was a signal that it was time for you to wrap up your affairs and get ready to leave the planet early, and the film plays quite differently in an era in which the AIDS industry has declared “HIV” (and the shift in nomenclature from “AIDS” to “HIV disease” to just “HIV” is revealing enough in itself, as well as the only allegedly viral disease in history for which a positive test for antibodies, which for most genuinely viral diseases is a sign of immunity, is considered a sure-fire sign that you will get the disease and die from it without “treatment”) “a chronic, manageable illness” and drugs both to treat it of you have it and “prophylaxis” to keep from getting it if you don’t are widely advertised on television. AIDS was a devastating catastrophe for the Queer community, especially Gay men, but it also had a weird silver lining; it convinced much of America that Gay men aren’t just sex-driven pigs. We really love each other and form enduring attachments just like straight people, and when we get sick our partners care for us and visit us in the hospital.

To me one fascinating aspect of this movie is the way in which Andy’s partner Miguel (Antonio Banderas, a straight actor who achieved stardom in the films of openly Gay director Pedro Almodóvar) is basically told to get lost when Andy is in the hospital and he’s asked if he’s part of Andy’s immediate family, and the way Charles was treated at the hospital when I had my own health crisis in late 2021. I told them that Charles was my husband, and he was properly respected and treated decently and reasonably as someone who would be responsible for my care after I left the hospital. It’s a measure of just how far we have come since this film was made almost three decades ago that in 1996 the U.S. Congress passed the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” stating that only marriages between one man and one woman would be legally recognized by the federal government for tax, health benefits and other purposes; and the recent vote in the U.S. Senate, with 12 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, to allow a first debate on the floor for the “Respect for Marriage Act,” which would enshrine the rights of same-sex couples and interracial couples to marry into federal law. It is also a measure of how far we’ve come that, though the radical Right (especially the radical religious Right) still opposes what they refer to as “so-called ‘Gay rights,’” they’ve realized that they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns bashing Gay and Lesbian people and are focusing their ire on Trans people instead. (I wrote the above after the news of the shooting at the Club “Q” in Colorado Springs, Colorado but before the latest news coverage of it, including reports that far-Right Web sites are actually praising the lethal assault on Club “Q” at which five people and more “moderate” Web sites saying that the victims brought it on themselves by attending a drag show or whatever. Maybe I was being overly optimistic about the broader acceptance of Queer people in general in society.)