I haven't yet seen Disney's new live-action Beauty and the Beast. Life is not long enough to allow us the luxury of chasing down every last rabbit hole, and I know the general outlines of the story and the life lessons it means to impart. It is meant to introduce yet another generation to a clutch of the resilient characters who might colonize their imaginations. It's only a movie, meant to entertain and seduce children.
And I'm neither shocked nor gladdened by the "gay moment" that has become a talking point -- I don't care that they've finally removed the ambiguity from LeFou's (Josh Gad) desire to be with Gaston (Luke Evans). I think we need to be honest with children, and that means presenting them with worlds congruent to the one they'll eventually have to navigate.
At the same time, I recognize a publicity stunt when I see one; if we put a gay character in a Disney film someone will take the bait. And people like me may feel obliged to comment on it. So ... thanks, Disney.
The first gay character I remember noticing on the screen was Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) in Sidney Lumet's based-on-a-true-story Dog Day Afternoon which I saw in a theater not too long after it opened in 1975. It didn't have a tremendous effect. I considered myself fairly sophisticated and understood gay people existed, even if I wasn't sure that I knew any.
Looking back, it's a little embarrassing to recall how naive I was at 16 years old. I obviously knew gay people. I had acted in some theatrical productions. My namesake uncle, with whom I'd spent several summer vacations, was a gay man who lived in San Francisco. He took me to the opera. I believe he may have occasionally worn an ascot.
Yet I never caught on.
Sonny Wortzik held up a bank to get money for his lover's (Chris Sarandon) sex-change operation. I understood that made him gay, though I wonder if there isn't some more precise or more sensitive way to describe Sonny's particular predilection. Sonny's lover was born male, and Sonny planned to pay for his sex reassignment surgery with proceeds from the bank heist.
The bank robbery depicted in the movie took place in 1972 when homosexuality was still classified as a disease and the gay rights movement, to the extent it existed at all, was in its embryonic stages.
In real life, Sonny (whose real name was John Wojtowicz) was living with Liz Eden, formerly Ernest Aron, whom he had married in a flamboyant (but obviously not legally effective) ceremony some months before he undertook the robbery. In the end, Wojtowicz paid for Eden's sex change with money he was paid by the producers of Dog Day Afternoon.
If you look at the Wojtowicz mug shot that resulted from the robbery, you might note a remarkable resemblance to the young Robert De Niro. Nevertheless, it was to Pacino and Dustin Hoffman that Life magazine writers P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore compared him.
In The Dog, a 2014 documentary about Wojtowicz (who died in 2006) directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, Lumet says that Pacino took a great risk when he played the role because "no major star that I know of had ever played a gay man." Maybe that is so, though one wonders if Lumet had ever seen Billy Quirk in Algie, the Miner (1912) or Charlie Chaplin in Behind the Screen (1917). "Pansies" were common characters in the early days of the movies -- the 1927 silent Western A Wanderer of the West presents us with Clarence, a gay storekeeper, described on a title card as "one of nature's mistakes in a land where men are men."
Almost all of Laurel and Hardy's comedies were imbued with what we might recognize as a gay subtext -- the pair often ended up in bed together and their wives were nearly always portrayed as obstacles to the primary relationship between the two men. In Their First Mistake, a 1932 film produced by the great Hal Roach, Stan and Ollie are in bed when Stan asks Ollie why his wife seems upset:
Ollie: Oh, I don't know. She says I think more of you than I do of her.
Stan: Well, you do, don't you?
Ollie: We won't go into that.
To be sure, Laurel and Hardy never portrayed overtly gay characters; it could be argued that Stan and Ollie inhabited an infantile pre-sexual universe. But there were plenty of openly gay portrayals, mainly effeminate sissies, on the screen in the early days of motion pictures.
By the mid-1930s, however, forces led by the Catholic Legion of Decency began to lobby for federal censorship of the movies, resulting in the strengthening of the Motion Picture Production Code. By adding a prohibition against "sexual perversion," the code forced suggestive or overt references to homosexuality off the screen. Gay characters persisted, however; and only the most naive filmgoers could fail to recognize them. A deliciously mischievous scene from Howard Hawks' Red River has young cowboys Montgomery Clift and John Ireland comparing shooting irons.
Ireland instructs Clift: "There are only two things more beautiful than a good gun -- a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. You ever had a Swiss watch?"
And in Hawks' 1938 film Bringing Up Baby, May Robson discovers Cary Grant in a lace nightgown and asks if he usually dresses that way. Grant leaps up and shouts, "No, I've just gone gay -- all of a sudden!" What the movie neglects to tell us -- but Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet does -- is that the line was ad-libbed by Grant; it appears in none of the published scripts of the film.
Whether Pacino deserves credit for being the first major star to play a gay character or not, Dog Day Afternoon is remarkable for the nonstereotypical way it portrays Sonny, who is hot-headed and impulsive but not particularly effeminate. Instead, his intentions are presented sympathetically, as a last-ditch effort that's both doomed and noble. However wrong his actions, Sonny is motivated by love for his partner.
And in The Dog, we discover that the real-life Wojtowicz had at least a kernel of weird integrity. The documentary shows him as narcissistic, promiscuous and bisexual, shameless about wanting to marry whomever he was in love with.
That was a remarkable sentiment to express in 1975; some of us still find it hard to accept today. So maybe it's fine to signal kids that LeFou (which unfortunately translates as "the fool") has a crush on Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. I've not seen the scene. But those who give it a pass on the grounds that "it's a start" are provably wrong.
More than 40 years ago, Lumet and Pacino were past this.
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MovieStyle on 03/10/2017