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style of The Closet, but the latter persisted for some time, to say
the least, in the realm of mainstream movies. A piece here (by
Mark Zelinsky) revisits 1993’s
Philadelphia
—24 years after
Stonewall—hailed as a breakthrough for its depiction of a sym-
pathetic gay character with AIDS. Three years later, even
The
Birdcage
was a breakthrough of sorts: a campy movie that fi-
nally let the cat out of the bag for straight audiences.
If gay viewers squirmed through both of these films, it’s be-
cause they were created for straight eyes, which were now trained
on Hollywood’s version of our own private subculture. To be
sure, a genre of gay cinema expressly for GLBT viewers has ex-
isted for decades, but these films rarely make it out of the art
houses. Perhaps the first non-cringeworthy movie to hit the big
time was
Brokeback Mountain
(2005), which was only ten years
ago, and a steady trickle of mainstream films, such as
Milk
(2008)
and
Dallas Buyers Club
(2013), has followed.
What marks these more recent works is the suspension of
masks and Camp in favor of a search for authenticity that has
been a parallel theme of GLBT culture since the age of liberation
began. Caitlyn would argue that only by transitioning has she be-
come her “real” self. Increasingly, the mainstream audience for
movies (or reality TV shows, etc.) seems prepared to accept de-
partures from the norm, whether in gender or sexual orientation,
so long as it entails an arduous search for one’s true self.
R
ICHARD
S
CHNEIDER
J
R
.
T
HE media mega-story as I write concerns the transforma-
tion of Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn, whereby an aging man
metamorphosed into a beautiful young woman, leading
me to wonder (see “BTW”) whether technology is now making
it possible for anyone with the means to choose a new identity
and transition into it. Shifting shapes, however, is an ancient ar-
chetype, one that often involves gender or sexuality.
Examples of this trope are brought to mind here in J. Ken
Stuckey’s piece, which describes how two widely separated
movies,
Midnight Cowboy
and
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, present
cases of borrowing or stealing a new identity for opportunistic
reasons—in Joe Buck’s case by adopting a cowboy persona to
attract johns; in Ripley’s, by murdering and assuming the iden-
tity of a rich (straight) friend. So often in literature and in the
movies, whenever identities are in confusion or in flux there’s a
strong possibility of “inversion” in gender or sexual orientation.
Doubtless this tendency is related to the fact that GLBT peo-
ple have often had to hide their true identity, or even create a false
one, to cope with social strictures. Vito Russo showed in
The Cel-
luloid Closet
that gay characters in the movies have worn a va-
riety of masks that were deeply coded but clearly recognizable to
the cognoscenti. The whole idea of Camp is that a studied the-
atricality—excessively good manners, for example—is itself a
tipoff that we’re entering homo territory.
The credo of “coming out” after 1969 challenged the furtive
Summer into Fall: “The Movies”
FROM THE EDITOR
4
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE