The Celluloid Closet (Telling Pictures, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, Home Box Office, Channel 4, ZDF/Arte, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) last night (Wednesday, June 21) at 9 for a showing of the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and written by them and Sharon Wood based on the 1981 book of the same title by Vito Russo. Vito Russo worked as an archivist in the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art (a crucial institution in the history of film preservation thanks to its pioneering photo curator, Iris Barry, who in 1939 started acquiring prints of old movies to make sure they weren’t lost forever; along with Paul Killiam, Barry is responsible for us having as much of the legacy of the silent era as we do) and, as a Gay man, started doing research on the history of depictions of Gay men, Lesbians and other Queer folk in film. I remember reading Russo’s book in 1983, two years after it was published and as I was first coming out as a Gay man, and I specifically recall that instead of a salacious book attempting to dope out based on the fragmentary evidence available who in Hollywood history was, wasn’t or might have been Queer, he stressed he was going to focus on the actual content of the films themselves and the messages they sent to both straight and Queer moviegoers about who we are and how we fit in – or don’t – into society. I first saw the film The Celluloid Closet shortly after its release at the late and very much lamented Ken Cinema on Adams Avenue in San Diego. The narration was written by Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City novels, and delivered by Lily Tomlin, one of the quieter Hollywood Queers; she never really trumpeted that she was a Lesbian but she didn’t bother denying it, either, and people quietly understood that Jane Wagner was more than just her filmmaking partner.

Epstein and Friedman bought the movie rights to Russo’s book shortly after its publication and also when they were riding high off their Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. They intended to make The Celluloid Closet their next project, but in the meantime the AIDS crisis hit and instead their next film was AIDS-themed: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989). During the time they were waiting for financing to come through for The Celluloid Closet – an unusually expensive proposition because they needed the money to license clips from the films Russo had mentioned as well as others made during the intervening 14 years – Russo himself died of complications from AIDS in 1990. There’s one scene in The Celluloid Closet which still rankles me: Epstein and Friedman carefully do parallel editing to compare the scene in which Sebastian Venable is hunted down and cannibalized by the Spanish boys he’s been molesting in the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer with the villagers chasing the Frankenstein Monster in James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. The point Epstein and Friedman thought they were making with this juxtaposition was that Hollywood’s treatment of Gay men was straight out of a horror film – both the Monster and Sebastian were creatures of unstoppable menace that needed to be destroyed to preserve the “normal” social order – but in fact, as I pointed out in my moviemagg blog post on The Bride of Frankenstein (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-bride-of-frankenstein-universal-1935.html), “[W]hat it really indicated was the difference between an out and proud Gay man like [Bride of Frankenstein director] James Whale expressing sympathy for the outsider and turning the Monster into a man, and a bitterly self-hating closet case like Tennessee Williams expressing hatred and fear for the outsider and turning Sebastian into a monster.”

Suddenly, Last Summer was based on a play Williams wrote at the suggestion of a psychiatrist who, in line with the medical orthodoxy of the day, was trying to “cure” him of being Gay. One of the ways Williams’ psychiatrist had of doing this was to tell him to stop writing plays about monstrous heterosexuals and instead write one about a monstrous homosexual. The Bride of Frankenstein/Suddenly, Last Summer connection in the film The Celluloid Closet especially rankled me because, despite Vito Russo’s stated intention in his book to avoid discussing whether particular people in Hollywood history were Gay, he deliberately made an exception for James Whale, whose Queerness is all over his work in his compassion for the outsider (when he was preparing to direct the 1931 Frankenstein he told his partner, David Lewis, that the more he read the various scripts the more sympathy he felt for the Monster) and his love of theatricality and artifice. Other than that major glitch, though, The Celluloid Closet holds up quite well, even though the interview with writer Gore Vidal on the alleged Queer undertones in the 1959 Ben-Hur was rightfully criticized because the two people who could have confirmed or disconfirmed it, director William Wyler and actor Stephen Boyd, were both conveniently dead when Vidal’s interview was shot (and while Vidal had some involvement in writing the script for Ben-Hur he didn’t get a credit; Karl Tunberg was the sole credited screenwriter).

The Celluloid Closet contains some of the most stunning images of sexual role-playing ever put on screen, including Marlene Dietrich’s on-screen kiss of another woman in Morocco (1930) and the scene in a Greenwich Village bar of two effeminate men singing a song about sailors from the 1932 Clara Bow vehicle Call Her Savage. (Since then I’ve seen Call Her Savage complete [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html], and it turned out to be one of the masterpieces of the so-called “pre-Code era,” a remarkable vehicle for Bow and director John Francis Dillon and a film that deserves to be far better known than it is.) Russo variously identified this and the rather sorry joint in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent 30 years later as the first Gay bar on film; Advise and Consent was a political melodrama in which one of the Senators holding up a contested nomination for Secretary of State is Brigham Young Anderson of Utah (Don Murray), who on the surface is a good little Mormon boy but secretly had a Gay affair with a fellow soldier in World War II, and now his former partner is blackmailing him. Brig enters the bar to meet her lover-turned-blackmailer and the soundtrack plays a song specially recorded for the scene by Frank Sinatra, who never released it as a record so it can only be heard in the film. In The Celluloid Closet Armistead Maupin remembered seeing this film while he was a teenager (and still a virgin) and wondering whether this would be what he’d have to look forward to when he grew up and attained sexual maturity. Otto Preminger, a mediocre director but one with a flair for controversial themes (he’d antagonized the Production Code Administration, the movie industry’s self-censorship board, twice before – using the words “virgin” and “pregnant” in his 1953 sex comedy The Moon Is Blue and confronting the Code’s flat ban on depicting drug addiction in the 1956 melodrama The Man with the Golden Arm), announced that he’d bought the rights to Allan Drury’s novel Advise and Consent and he intended to film it with the novel’s Gay subplot intact despite the flat ban under the Production Code on depicting “sex perversion or any inference of it.” Preminger’s persistence got the Code amended to allow “sex aberrations” to be shown “with discretion and restraint.”

In the meantime, British filmmaker Basil Dearden had made a 1961 thriller called Victim about a Gay man who’s being blackmailed, and is ultimately murdered, because he’d been having an affair with a politician played by Dirk Bogarde, and while one wonders why the blackmailers didn’t go after Bogarde’s character instead (he had much more money and a lot more to lose), it’s still a quite gripping movie and The Celluloid Closet includes the great scene in which he has to tell his wife about his Gay desires. Though British filmmakers had to contend with actual government censorship instead of the mere threat of it which the Production Code was meant to forestall, it’s long been the case that European censors have come down harder on violence but easier on sex than American ones. Indeed, one of the reasons foreign films began to build a following in the U.S. after World War II was precisely that, not hamstrung by the Production Code, they could deal with sex far more honestly and openly than American ones. The Celluloid Closet begins to lose its rigor once the filmmakers start dealing with more recent movies that were made between 1981 and 1995; aside from including clips from films as varied as My Own Private Idaho, Silkwood, Thelma and Louise (where the two doomed heroines kiss each other on the lips just before they drive their car off a cliff), Personal Best and the audacious Desert Hearts – Donna Deitch’s remarkable movie about a hostelry in Reno where an unhappily married woman goes to get a divorce and discovers her Lesbian yearnings – it’s a rather muddled presentation lacking the tight-knit structure of Russo’s original material.

Russo ended his book with a discussion of the movie Cruising (1980), a film so blatantly homophobic (it starred Al Pacino as a police detective investigating a serial killer targeting Gay leathermen) Queer demonstrators picketed the film’s locations while it was still being shot. One interviewee said both he and his partner were Queer-bashed and nearly killed by two men who told them during the attack, “If you saw Cruising you’d know why we had to do this.” Since 1995 we’ve seen a slightly greater acceptance of positive depictions of Queer characters on screen – and as the film points out, for some reason Lesbian depictions raise fewer hackles than those between men (I suspect it’s at least in part because Americans define sex in such exclusively phallic terms that they don’t see how two people who don’t have a dick between them can really have “sex”) – but we’ve also seen the usual one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience virtually all oppressed minorities have to deal with. Just when it seemed that Americans had reached a modicum of acceptance of homosexuality in general, along came modern-day Republicans with their so-called “war on woke,” “woke” being defined as just about anything they don’t like, including a jihad against Queer people in general and Trans people and drag queens in particular.