SOMETIMES coincidence is all we need to see that modern gay life unfolded in America even outside those vanguard movements that began with the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s, then coalesced in more radical forms after Stonewall. I became aware of an untold history recently when Amazon Prime added the early gay film, A Very Natural Thing, to its streaming lineup. Gay people of a certain age will recall this movie, which was released in 1974. It was one of the first feature-length, mainstream films that attempted to normalize gay people and their relationships. Watching it again gave me a new appreciation for the personal stories that helped produce one version of gay culture in the U.S., not least because I uncovered a connection between an actor in the film and the institution where I’ve taught for over thirty years.
What this discovery did, in effect, was to connect the dots between Furman University and the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and ’70s. A formerly Baptist school in the Bible Belt of South Carolina, Furman seems a million intellectual miles from all that. And yet, when I googled the actors in A Very Natural Thing, I discovered that one of them, Robert Joel McLane (or Robert Joel, as he was billed in the film), was a 1965 Furman grad. I found his pictures on the Furman Theatre Department website, read stories about him in archives of the student newspaper, and followed his undergraduate progress in The Bonhomie, Furman’s yearbook. I even located retired colleagues whose memories stretch back to the early 1960s, and who recalled Robert with fondness and testified to his talent.
McLane initially landed roles in professional theater productions, working in the burgeoning experimental scene (at La Mama), Off Broadway with people like James Earl Jones, and on tour, where he played Johnny Pope to Tippi Hedrin’s Celia in Michael Gazzo’s groundbreaking 1956 play about drug addiction, A Hatful of Rain. Or so he reported in his biography for Theater World 26. I couldn’t verify all this information, but I did come across one old-timer in Alberta, Canada, who remembered Hedrin’s performance in the play. Alas, he didn’t keep his playbills. (He must have been straight!)
What was more easily verified is that McLane debuted on Broadway in 1969 as “He Who Hears Thunder” in Arthur Kopit’s Indians. A year later, he landed a leading role in the prestigious NET Playhouse television drama They Have Taken Over, adapted from the novel by Marya Mannes. You barely catch sight of him in Alan Arkin’s Little Murders of 1971. But he’s on full display in a few films that purported to be serious explorations of sex and gender relations in those liberated days. Never mind that, in hindsight, they look like run-of-the-mill 1970s sexploitation flicks. McLane also makes a prominent appearance in porn auteur Russ Meyer’s last film, the hilariously bad UP! (1976), which you can see in all its glory on YouTube.
McLane’s most enduring performance, however, was as David in A Very Natural Thing, directed by Christopher Larkin. Watching it after so many years and so many good gay films, one can’t ignore its limitations. The movie’s opening, for instance, cuts awkwardly between footage of the 1973 gay pride parade in New York and its main plot, which is the story of David, an ex-monk, after he leaves the monastery to seek a more fulfilling gay life in the City. The cinematography is grainy and often too dark. To keep things in perspective, though, the images of the 1973 gay pride parade in New York City, just four years after Stonewall, lend the film a measure of documentary importance. And its long and justifiably famous final scene of two naked men disporting themselves in the waves off Cape Cod is beautiful and almost rises to cinematic greatness.
The focus on David’s efforts to find love in his new life gives the film an intellectual and emotional heft that many gay films lack even today. A Very Natural Thing debates the nature of same-sex attraction at a time of sexual excess. It is not another stale tale about the trials of coming out as gay. Instead it addresses the question of how to live as what was then a brand new thing, an openly gay person. At the same time, the film is more explicit and provocative in its representation of gay sex and male nudity than many gay films are even today. Thus despite its flaws, A Very Natural Thing was a notable accomplishment, both culturally and æsthetically.
Of special interest to me is the role the young Robert McLane may have played in the film’s conception. Obviously, Baptist Furman and rural South Carolina were not, then or now, especially healthy places for young gay men. McLane would surely have heard from his peers and professors at Furman that homosexuals were destined for Hell. But sexual tensions often play out within the structures of devotion in religious institutions, and McLane would not be the first gay man to come to a religious college like Furman to train for a pious life. As early as his sophomore year, in 1963, he was a member of Furman’s “Ministerial ‘ Union,” and his admission records make clear his intention to seek a career as a Baptist minister. If McLane’s protestations of faith were not simple diversions—and I doubt they were—he clearly became disenchanted with the religious life. And one has to assume that in heading to New York, he had more than an inkling of the gay world that awaited.
McLane was a young man not unlike the film’s director. Christopher Larkin left a monastery to live as a gay man in New York, and critics have long interpreted A Very Natural Thing as partially autobiographical. But McLane’s similar religious experiences as a South Carolina Baptist may also have shaped the compelling arguments about love and compassion that his character David advances in the film. Sex between men, he says, is best when it takes place in a loving, monogamous relationship. At the height of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s, that idea was seen as unenlightened and downright square. Nevertheless, McLane’s own moral understanding, underwritten by the social and spiritual values that would have surrounded him at a Baptist college, is undoubtedly present in the film. Decades later, variations on these same themes played a role in the Supreme
Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
It is difficult to discover much more about McLane. Jim Fouratt, an early gay activist and cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front, claims to have been his lover when the two of them moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s. In later years, McLane worked for the L.A. AIDS Project. By most accounts, he spent the last years of his life in Riverside, California, as a teacher and playwright. In tragic fulfillment of another epic gay story—the battle against AIDS—McLane died from the disease in 1992, at age 48. His panel on the AIDS quilt recalls him simply as a “Playwright,” “Loving Friend,” and “Teacher.”
McLane may not have set the world ablaze with his activism or his art, but he was a young man who struck out against the odds to live the life that he chose, in his own way. His was an early success—captured forever on celluloid—in the ongoing gay and lesbian struggle to write anew the story of life in America.
Nick Radel, professor of English at Furman University, is the author of Understanding Edmund White (2013) and is currently writing a biography of Edmund White.
