$6.95 US, $7.95 Canada May–June 2024 The Celluloid Fishbowl GLRk ANDReWWHiTe PeTeR MuiSe FRANk RizzO eRik LeWiS ANDReWHOLLeRAN On the Road to Hobohemia BYWILLIAMBENEMANN The Silence of The Bell Jar BYDENISE NOE Queer Ghosts on Oscar Night JohnWatersWent There The Makingof Longtime Companion DirkBogarde?YouRememberHimasAschenbach The Strangeness of All of Us Strangers
The Gay & Lesbian Review May–June 2024 • VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 3 The Gay & Lesbian Review/WORLDWIDE®(formerlyThe Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates: U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2024 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. POEMS &DEPARTMENTS John Waters Went There 10 PETERMUISE ... and the rest of us looked on in horror and hilarity Queer Ghosts on Oscar Night 13 ANDREWWHITE The Academy still clings to the narrative of homosexual doom The Making of Longtime Companion 16 FRANKRIZZO How a gay-made film about AIDS broke through all the ceilings Spoiler Alert (Not Really) 20 ANDREWHOLLERAN All of Us Strangers’ meaning is never less clear than when it ends On the Road to Hobohemia 24 WILLIAMBENEMANN Hobos riding the rails formed a variety of intimate bonds The Silence of The Bell Jar 28 DENISE NOE Sylvia Plath’s anti-lesbian asides belie a deep attraction to women CONTENTS FEATURES REVIEWS GUEST OPINION— The Anti-LGBT Tide Is Turning in Florida 5 ERINREED CORRESPONDENCE 6 BTW 8 RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. ART MEMO— The Curious Arc of Dirk Bogarde’s Star 19 ERIKLEWIS ART MEMO— Why Lord Byron Still Matters 22 WILLIAMKUHN POEM— “Canned Goods” 27 NEALKENT ARTIST’S PROFILE — Gavin Geoffrey Dillard’s Beat Goes On 32 TREBORHEALEY ARTIST’S PROFILE — Horrigan Leaves Matthiessen Behind 38 CHARLES GREEN POEM— “Lagos Lagoon” 43 AMEENANIMASHAUN CULTURAL CALENDAR 46 POEM— “Cereal Dating” 48 MICHAELAPPELL ART MEMO— Monaca Majoli’s Homage toBlueboy 49 NICKSNIDER Brad Gooch —Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring 31 JOHNR. KILLACKY Raymond-Jean Frontain, ed. —Conversations with Terrence McNally 34 THOMAS KEITH Patrick Nathan —The Future Was Color: A Novel 35 DANIELA. BURR Anne Eekhout —Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein: A Novel 36 ROBERTALLENPAPINCHAK Edward Cahill —Disorderly Men 37 HANKTROUT Judith Butler —Who’s Afraid of Gender? 40 REGINALDHARRIS Soula Emmanuel —WildGeese 41 ANNE CHARLES Stephen McCauley —You Only Call When You’re in Trouble: A Novel 42 BRIANBROMBERGER Debanuj Dasgupta, et al., eds. —Queer Then and Now 42 ANNE CHARLES BRIEFS 44 Three Films: Fellow Travelers; LiewithMe; Nyad 47 ALLENELLENZWEIG Emerald Fennell, director —Saltburn 50 JONATHANALEXANDER WEBSITE: www.GLReview.org • SUBSCRIPTIONS: 847-504-8893 • ADVERTISING: 617-421-0082 • SUBMISSIONS: Editor@GLReview.org Editor-in-Chief and Founder RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. Literary Editor MARTHAE. STONE Poetry Editor DAVIDBERGMAN Associate Editors SAMDAPANAS PAULFALLON JEREMYFOX MICHAELSCHWARTZ Contributing Writers ROSEMARYBOOTH DANIELA. BURR COLINCARMAN ANNE CHARLES ALFREDCORN ALLENELLENZWEIG CHRIS FREEMAN PHILIP GAMBONE MATTHEWHAYS HILARYHOLLADAY ANDREWHOLLERAN IRENE JAVORS JOHNR. KILLACKY CASSANDRALANGER ANDREWLEAR FELICE PICANO JAMES POLCHIN JEANROBERTA VERNONROSARIO Contributing Artist CHARLES HEFLING Publisher STEPHENHEMRICK Webmaster BOSTONWEBGROUP WebEditor ALLISONARMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors ART COHEN(CHAIR) EDUARDOFEBLES ROBERT HARDMAN STEPHENHEMRICK HILARYHOLLADAY DAVIDLAFONTAINE JIMJACOBS ANDREWLEAR RICHARDSCHNEIDER, JR. (PRESIDENT) THOMAS YOUNGREN(TREASURER) STEWARTCLIFFORD(CHAIR EMER.) WARRENGOLDFARB(SR. ADVISOR EMER.) WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 The Celluloid Fishbowl WORLDWIDE May–June 2024 3
1970s, Peter Muise tracks the full trajectory of his career and shows how he slowly moved toward mainstream respectability, even as the American public grew ever harder to shock— thanks, in part, to Waters’ own influence. The 1980s marked the arrival of films with openly gay characters, who were typically engaged in a death dance with AIDS. However, there had yet to be made a film told from a gay person’s point of view, a lacuna that was recognized by a group of gay theater people led by playwright Craig Lucas. As documented here by Frank Rizzo, who was a journalist covering the story, Longtime Companion (1989) was a labor of love that began with Lucas’ screenplay and called upon the talents of countless investors, actors, technicians, editors, and the horde of people needed to make a major movie on a minor budget. Decades passed; a bona fide LGBT film industry arose for the home market, while movies with gay themes pitched to a mainstream audience continued to dribble out at a few per decade. In 2023, a British film was released that brings us back to this issue’s theme. All of Us Strangers is about two gay men who live in an otherwise empty glass-and-steel high-rise; often we observe them through the windows of their flats. Andrew Holleran finds in this film a portrait of gay loneliness untethered to the social order or to reality itself. Was it all just a dream? RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. THIS ISSUE’S THEME is of course a reference to Vito Russo’s 1981 book, The Celluloid Closet, which documented the many films in pre-Stonewall America that hinted at an LGBT message or possibility, whether through subtle gestures or ambiguous language. Everything changed after the 1960s. Suddenly there were out gay people whose lives could be portrayed or documented on film, and often the aim was to proclaim the existence of LGBT people, and their struggle, to anyone who would listen. One way to track this transformation could be by tallying the mainstream awards received by movies with explicitly gay characters or themes. In this issue, Andrew White analyzes the history of Oscar nominations since William Hurt became the first person to win Best Actor for playing a gay role, in 1986, in Kiss of the Spider Woman. White argues that this was the first in a string of Oscar nominees that depicted an LGBT character who died or otherwise came to a bad end. Even films with an ostensibly “pro-gay” message, fromPhiladelphia(1993) to Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), ended up killing off their main gay character (from AIDS in both of these cases). The “fishbowl” metaphor seems apt to describe the early films of John Waters, which were expressly exhibitionistic in their desire to bring a campy sensibility to a mainstream, albeit a midnight, audience. WhilePink Flamingos andFemale Trouble earned Waters the sobriquet the “Pope of Trash” in the Pride Issue: ‘The Celluloid Fishbowl’ FROM THE EDITOR 4 TheG&LR unmpress.com In this stunning debut story collection, everyone’s got the blues but nobody is willing to sing it. newfrom the university of new mexico press The first English-language monograph on the artist’s life and work, featuring full-color reproductions of Galán’s artwork and photographic material. “This book will become an indispensable touchstone for anyone studying Julio Galán.” —raphael rubinstein, author of Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990–2002 “Like Alice Munro and Andrea Barrett, Meischen conveys the significance of the present moment by laying bare what has come before.” —bret anthony, author of Remember Me Like This: A Novel
In a press release from the Human Rights Campaign, Geoff Wetrosky stated: “We are shifting the momentum. People across the state showed up by the thousands to speak out and push back against anti-LGBTQ+ bills; and they are to thank for pushing back the tide of hateful and discriminatory policy.” Not every bill was defeated in Florida, which still has some of the harshest anti-transgender laws in the nation. The one bill that did pass, H1291, prohibits educating teachers on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics and bars “teaching identity politics.” Transgender drivers still face the potential revocation of their driver’s licenses, and many transgender adults have lost access to gender-affirming care. Florida also enforces a restroom ban that could incarcerate transgender individuals for up to a year. However, this is the first time in three years that bills targeting LGBT people, and trans people in particular, seem to be losing steam. Stated Nadine Smith of Equality Florida in a press release: “Extremist groups are collapsing amidst multiple scandals. Parents are mobilizing on behalf of their kids and to stop the dismantling of public education. We will build on this momentum and redouble our commitment to the fight. Together, we can put power back in the hands of the people.” Erin Reed is a transgender woman (she/her) who writes a widely read blog, Erin in the Morning, from which this piece has been excerpted. The Anti-LGBT Tide Is Turning in Florida ERINREED FLORIDA’S LEGISLATURE adjourned its session in March with 21 out of 22 anti-LGBT bills effectively killed, handing Governor Ron DeSantis a humiliating defeat and leading the Human Rights Campaign to conclude that “the tide has turned” on such legislation in Florida. Among the bills that failed was H599, which would have expanded “Don’t Say Gay” policies to the workplace, barring government employees and government contractors from sharing pronouns and prohibiting all nonprofits from requiring education and training on LGBT issues. Another bill that died was H1639, which would have mandated transgender individuals to have driver’s license sex markers matching their sex assigned at birth. It also aimed to penalize insurance providers for offering gender-affirming care coverage. Other bills that died on the vine include: • A ban on Pride flags in schools and government buildings; • A “bill of rights” allowing student organizations to exclude transgender people; • A bill that would end legal recognition of trans people; • A bill that would exempt rejection of transgender youth from child abuse provisions; and • A bill that would allow calling someone racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic to be treated as defamation. GUEST OPINION May–June 2024 5 Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu New from “Just as fabulously queer as you’d imagine, faithful reader.”—Matt Hills, author of Triumph of a Time Lord Cloth $25.00
Russian State Media Is on Our Shores To the Editor: Diana Sadretdinova’s op-ed piece, “How Russian Media Demonizes LGBT People” [March-April 2024], is shocking and frightening, not only for its description of the hellhole Putin has created for LGBT Russians, but also because the “Russian Media” in the title can easily be replaced by “Fox News” to describe what is being broadcast day and night at America’s most-watched cable network. Fox News routinely reports that our Pride flags promote pedophilia and the “grooming” of children, that boycotts are the appropriate reaction to businesses that market to gay and trans consumers, and that the mere mention of our existence in schools “sexualizes children.” The hate promoted in Putin’s Russia and on Fox News is not new, but it is newly dangerous. Rwandan Hutus used media to relentlessly attack the Tutsi minority prior to the 1994 genocide, and Nazis used media to demonize Jews in the early 1930’s, isolating German Jews from the rest of society and desensitizing non-Jewish Germans to the increasing persecution of their Jewish neighbors. Fox routinely uses its vast broadcast and digital empire to promote stories that reflect negatively on LGBT people, jumping on them even when later they prove to be inaccurate. After a recent shooting at a church in Houston, the Fox News digital headline triumphantly reported the shooter to be transgender. Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly seized on a false narrative that the female shooter “lived as a man” and was just another in an “epidemic” of trans shootings. When Fox realized the trans identity of the shooter was false, they changed the headline, and reported, buried deep in the original piece, that “some news outlets had mistakenly reported that the shooter was trans.” Although the war against LGBT Americans being waged at Fox and smaller right-wing media outlets is not currently supported by our federal government, that might change if the anti-LGBT bigots at Fox are buoyed by national Republican victories in November. Should this happen, Fox News’ dream of the Christian nationalist Russification of America will be well underway. Marc Paige, Fairhaven, MA Rainbow Flags in the Market St. March To the Editor: I have a quibble with Emily L. Quint Freeman’s essay on Harvey Milk in the March-April 2024 issue titled “November 1978: The Agony and the Irony.” I attended the 1978 Pride event, walking from my apartment in the Castro down Market Street to Powell Street. I saw no rainbow flags until I encountered the two astonishingly enormous banners at the Civic Center on Market Street. I was overwhelmed by the symbolism and took photos of the flags with my Instamatic camera. I don’t remember seeing any other rainbow flags on light standards or carried in the parade as described in the article. I found a YouTube video of the 1978 parade and it only shows the two giant flags I mentioned above. There were no other rainbow flags in the clip, not even an “accidental” rainbow costume in the massive crowd. In fact the whole event looked drab without the now common rainbow display. Jon Cloudfield Merkle, Oakland, CA One Figure Missing from SF Roundup To the Editor: Thanks for your San Francisco issue [March-April 2024]. I found it odd that Jim Van Buskirk, in “One Hundred Years of Togetherness,” would omit any mention of a towering figure of that century, who brought so many oppressed gay men together and, more importantly, was the first gay man to run for public office in the United States: José Julio Sarria, who usually went simply by José, otherwise known as Empress Norton I. José was the first to publicly file and run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in 1961—a seat won by Harvey Milk almost two decades later. Van Buskirk does include a mention of the Black Cat on Montgomery Street, where the determined drag queen and activist José would perform his distinct versions of famous operas (oftenCarmen) sometimes leading the patrons into the street to hold hands and sing “God Save Us Nelly Queens.” It was dangerous and thrilling and none of us who were there will ever forget the courage and empowerment—not to mention the sheer fun—delivered by this saint among us. José, the Empress Norton, deserves at least a mention in any history of gay San Francisco. Dave Campbell, Dayton, WA Corrections Outer Appearances, the thirtieth-anniversary book that replaced our January-February 2024 issue, contained an editorial mistake on page 18. The actual year of publication of Alan Cumming’s bookBaggage was 2021 (not 1921!). In the March-April 2024 issue’s In Memoriam column (page 7), Charles Silverstein was listed as a psychiatrist. He held a doctorate in social psychology and was a psychotherapist in a private practice, but was not an MD or a psychiatrist. Correspondence 6 TheG&LR FOR ITINERARIES, DATES, &PRICES Visit: OscarWildeTours.com Look for site on Facebook / Instagram All trips designed and led by Prof. Andrew Lear, founder of Oscar Wilde Tours. $200DISCOUNT FOR G&LRREADERS! 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habit of sexually abusing young men to come to light. Apparently Pressler’s MO was to have a trusted subordinate set up liaisons with teenage staffers, telling them that sex with Pressler was a “God-sanctioned secret.” But the scandal that’s rocking Texas politics is that Pressler’s most recent procurer was an attorney named Jared Woodfill who’s currently running for state senator, with the backing of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Charges and lawsuits against Pressler go back to 2004, but Woodfill continued to supply him with potential victims. What was in it for Woodfill isn’t entirely clear; perhaps it was purely fiduciary, which returns the spotlight to Pressler, that sad sack who apparently enjoyed talking trash with staffers about hot guys and recent conquests when not at the pulpit denouncing “the LGBTQlifestyle,” among other sins of the flesh. Reconcile This We may think we have a reasonable grasp of the men who made up the mob on January 6th, 2021—he’s a stereotypical Loser who doesn’t have a girlfriend and can’t hold down a job—but a recently convicted Proud Boy member doesn’t seem to compute. Steven Miles is a gay adult film actor who performs under the name Sergeant Miles, and he’s had a successful career with Lucas Entertainment, Falcon, Hot House, and Raging Stallion. To be sure, as a porn star he plays up the “gay thug” routine, but his sexual positioning could be described as “versatile.” What’s fascinating is that he tows the line completely in his Proud Boy role, going on about the “Deep State” and the stolen 2020 election, having sported a T-shirt on January 6th that read: “Trump 2020 Fuck Your Feelings.” His social media postings ooze with misogynistic comments about “feminazis and idiot Hillary supporters,” and he slammed the porn studios as “scared little bitches” for shutting down during the pandemic. And here is where he seems to be telling us something about the Proud Boys that we should heed. There seems to be little room for women in their movement, much less for the values of love and empathy that women represent. For Steven aka Sergeant Miles at least, the ability to toggle between Proud Boy and Pride Boy (of a sort) makes perfect sense. Problem Solved January 6th was back in the news when conservative Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk discussed a hypothetical situation related to the insurrection: “If the insurrectionists had started a gay orgy instead of vandalizing the Capitol, attempting to kill elected officials, and beating police officers, none of them would have been prosecuted. ... They should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex. That would have solved all the problems.” We need to understand the mindset that could conceivably find its way to this conclusion. He’s not just saying that homosexuality is so widely accepted that no one would have noticed it amid the chaos of the day. He’s suggesting that it’s so positively valued that engaging in it would actually have indemnified these actors from criticism and possibly from prosecution. Ah, well, one can imagine one of these Woke politicians sighing: “Surely if they were bad trespassers, they would not have taken the time to engage in such an upstanding activity!” It’s a weird little fantasy that seems apropos of nothing in particular, but if picturing male rioters getting it on in the Senate is what floats your whatever, sure, why not? BTW Wait, There’s More! We ended the last issue’s BTWwith a squib about a breaking story involving the head of Moms for Liberty, Bridget Ziegler, and her husband Christian, the former chair of the Florida Republican Party. It would be hard to overstate Moms for Liberty’s role, and that of Bridget Z., in the national effort to ban books in school libraries. Christian stands accused of rape by a woman who was apparently involved in three-way sex scenes with the Ziegler couple. Now that the deets are coming out, the whole thing is so much more sordid than we dared to imagine. Investigators have found emails showing that the Zieglers were actively looking for female partners with whom to have three-way sex—and it appears Bridget was the ringleader. Finding the rape-accusing gal a little too needy, Bridget despaired that they would need to “hunt for someone new.” Christian, for his part, was keeping a list of potential third parties, classified under the heading “Fuck”—a variant on Mitt Romney’s famous “binder full of women”? In any case, it’s just the kind of language that you’d expect from the people who want to prevent our children from ever encountering an LGBT character in a library book. Download This The cavalcade of prominent anti-LGBT clergymen and politicians with a secret gay history seems endless; and yet, like unhappy families, each is special in his own way. The case of Michael Voris offers the added bonus that he was an early leader of the “ex-gay” movement who founded and, until recently, headed up the Catholic media company Church Militant. Needless to say, the spectacle of “ex-gay” leaders and hucksters getting busted in gay flagrante is a commonplace; usually it involves being spotted in a gay bar or cruising on Grindr. What cost Voris his position at Church Militant were multiple instances of sending shirtless selfies to his staff. An investigation by Restoring the Faith reported that Voris had “continually [texted] half-nude selfies to his young, single male employees.” Sure, uploading these photos to the Church Militant Dropbox could be chalked up to carelessness (oops!), but sending them to young men under his tutelage seems downright reckless—possibly worth the risk if it resulted in a hookup? And if indeed that was the objective, let the reader be the judge of how realistic these hopes may have been. The Persistence of Creepiness A possible takeaway from the previous story is that “Hope springs eternal” when it comes to the male ego and its longing for the flower of youth. But the case of the 93-year-old Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler quickly returns us to the serious side of these deeply closeted gay men who go on destructive anti-LGBT rampages to appease their demons. Pressler’s age and longevity as a Christian leader make it all the more amazing that it took so long for his 8 TheG&LR
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1981, my father took me and my brother to see a double feature of two John Waters movies: Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos. I was fourteen, and my brother was three years older. My family had recently seen Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewPink Flamingos on their weekly TV show, and when my father learned that two Waters films were playing at the Nickelodeon Theater in Boston, he decided to take me and my brother to see them. My mother was not a fan of art films and declined to join us, perhaps wisely. Female Trouble(1974) was shown first, and this campy tale of juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport’s journey from teenage runaway to hideously disfigured and murderous performance artist appealed to my budding (but still closeted) gay sensibilities. As a fourteen-year-old gay boy, I was thrilled to see the titanic and terrifying drag queen Divine play a Catholic school ESSAY John Waters Went There PETERMUISE girl, and the eccentric Baltimore actress Edith Massey strut around in a lace-up leather catsuit and Frederick’s of Hollywood heels. But despite its gory ending and freaky sex scenes, Female Trouble still didn’t quite prepare me for Pink Flamingos (1972), the second film that day. Technically a comedy, Pink Flamingos is also an onslaught of shocking imagery. Two people kill a live chicken on-screen by crushing it between their bodies during sex. A creepy manservant masturbates into his hand, and then uses a syringe to impregnate women imprisoned in a pit with his semen. The protagonist, played by Divine, fellates her adult son as he moans “Oh, Mama, I should have known you’d be better than anyone.” And, most famously, after tarring and feathering her enemies and executing them with a gun, Divine eats actual dog excrement, rolling it around on her tongue like a delicious treat. All of these atrocities were performed by nonprofessional actors in cheap, garish costumes, delivering their lines in loud, declamatory style. I suppose some parents would have grabbed their kids and walked out, but my father didn’t. He had driven us all the way into the city and paid for our tickets. No cinematic atrocities could outweigh those sunk costs. We sat through both movies, back to back, but there was little conversation in the car ride home. I think we were all in shock at what we had seen. I’m grateful that my father took us to see the double feature, both for the experience and for the cultural capital it gave me as a high school freshman. Certainly, I was the first of my friends to see those films. Despite my appreciation, though, I would have laughed if anyone told me John Waters would someday receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which he did in September 2023. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A. is also hosting “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” a year-long exhibit honoring Waters and his films. The Museum is affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the same people who bring us the Oscars every year. Along with the exhibit, the Museum has issued a handsome hardcover catalogue, also titledJohn Waters: Pope of Trash, which has essays from scholar B. Ruby Rich (the current editor of FilmQuarterly) and David Simon (the award-winning producer of The Wire), among others. The book is large, full of beautiful photos, and suitable for displaying on a coffee table. It is downright tasteful. The Hollywood star, the museum exhibit, and the book are huge honors for John Waters. It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, an auteur who specializes in what he calls “art-exploitation” films and who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986. Waters was born in 1946, in Baltimore, and grew up in that city’s suburbs. The city has remained central to his work and his life. Unlike many queer people who leave their hometown to find freedom, Waters has kept his Baltimore roots and filmed all of his movies 10 TheG&LR
there. His parents were supportive of his creative endeavors, despite occasionally being horrified by them, and some of his earliest films were shot at their home. His father even helped him create some props, including a narcotics-dispensing vending machine for the short filmEat Your Makeup(1968). Waters made his first film, the short Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, in 1964. His last, the feature-length ADirty Shame, was made in 2004. In total, he’s written and directed sixteen films over his forty-year career, twelve of them feature-length, and all them have included actors and designers from Baltimore. His childhood friend Mary Vivian Pearce has appeared in every Waters film, with lead roles inPink Flamingos and Female Trouble. Waters dressed and styled Pearce to look like 1940s actress Jean Harlow, but far more famous than Pearce was Waters’ muse, whom he envisioned as Jayne Mansfield and named after a character in a Jean Genet novel: Divine. Born Harris Glenn Milstead, Divine befriended Waters during high school and appeared in several of his early shorts. Waters soon made Divine his preferred leading lady and gave him starring roles inMultiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester (1981), and Hairspray (1988). Divine became notorious for the shocking things he did in Waters’ early films, like eating that infamous dog poop, being raped by a giant lobster, and bouncing on a trampoline while shoving dead fish in his crotch. (Note that Divine identified as male and used he/him pronouns.) Divine used his notoriety to launch a mainstream show business career, but unfortunately it was cut short. The night before he was to start filming a recurring role on the popular sitcomMarried with Children, Divine died of a heart attack at age 42. Divine’s death was a huge emotional shock for Waters, but he continued on and made five more feature films. Much like Divine, Waters used his own notoriety to go mainstream and attract bigger-name actors to his films. This process began even before Divine’s death, with 1950s heartthrob Tab Hunter starring in Polyester as Divine’s love interest, and Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, and Jerry Stiller appearing in Hairspray. These performers may not have been the biggest Hollywood stars, but they were still better known than Waters’ usual stable of Baltimore actors. After Divine’s death, Waters began to attract and cast even bigger stars in his movies: Johnny Depp in Crybaby (1990), Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom(1994), and Melanie Griffith in Cecil B. Demented (2000). In minor roles, he cast cult figures like rocker Iggy Pop, celebrity hostage Patty Hearst, and Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro. Waters didn’t ask any of these actors to eat dog poop or have sex involving live poultry, but that’s because his style began to change after Desperate Living (1977). His films of the 1960s and ’70s were deliberately made to shock audiences. In addition to the disturbing scenes in his well-known movies likePink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Eat Your Makeup includes a re-creation of the JFK assassination with Divine as Jackie Kennedy, while Multiple Maniacs features a carnival sideshow of fetishists and a sex scene in a church involving Divine, a rosary, and visions of the life of Christ. And, inDesperate Living, a dog eats a dismembered penis and prisoners eat maggots. The film ends with a cannibalistic feast. But beginning with 1981’s Polyester, Waters reduced the shock value and tried another approach. Its plot does include murder, a violent foot fetishist, and teenage abortion, but Polyester, a parodic homage to Douglas Sirk-style women’s films, is much less graphic than his previous movies. Also unlike his previous movies, which were X-rated or unrated, Polyester received an R rating and wider distribution. Critics took note of this new approach, with Janet Maslin writing inThe New York Times that Polyester’s “comic vision is so controlled and steady that Mr. Waters need not rely so heavily on the grotesque touches that make his other films such perennial favorites on the weekend Midnight Movie circuit. Here’s one that can just as well be shown in the daytime.” The film did feature Odorama, a scratch-n-sniff promotional gimmick with scents like skunk and flatulence, but Polyester was a big step towards mainstream acceptance. Most of his subsequent films took the same approach by tackling controversial subjects, but in a relatively acceptable way. As John Waters: Pope of Trash points out, certain themes and topics run through all of Waters’ work, from his first shorts to his more mainstream features. His later films may be less overtly shocking, but they are still easily recognized as “John Peter Muise is author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) andWitches and Warlocks of Massachusetts (2021). It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986. May–June 2024 11 “Five decades of exuberance, defiance, solidarity, heartbreak and metamorphosis from artists who have reimagined how we think about gender and sexuality.” – The New York Times Featuring 350 artworks by LGBTQIA+ artists, tracking the relationship between trans and queer art Visit phaidon.com/aboutface SAVE20% WITHCODE QUEER Monacelli - A Phaidon Company
Waters movies” because they humorously explore and critique the same aspects of American culture as his earlier ones. Waters is gay, but queer characters and culture are not the main focus of his work (with the exception of Desperate Living, which has lesbian protagonists). Rather, he applies a queer or camp sensibility to examine and parody heterosexual social norms, particularly the nuclear family. It’s an approach that has won him a wide audience. Queer people go to John Waters’ films to see movies made by one of their own, while straight audiences attend to laugh at how their lives are portrayed onscreen. The American family, particularly in its suburban mode, is subverted, stressed, and stretched to its breaking point in many of his works. For example, inPink Flamingos Divine’s mother (Edith Massey) spends her days in a playpen eating eggs, and Divine’s character has sex with her son, while inFemale Trouble, teenage schoolgirl Dawn Davenport assaults her parents on Christmas morning for giving her the wrong type of shoes and runs away from home to have a daughter out of wedlock, whom she eventually murders when the daughter grows up to be a surly adolescent. In Polyester, Waters flipped the script, this time casting Divine as Francine Fishpaw, a long-suffering suburban housewife who’s married to a cheating, abusive spouse while raising violent adolescent children. And, in Desperate Living, Waters’ longtime collaborator Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel, a wealthy suburban housewife who incites her maid to murder her husband, comes out as a lesbian, and murders the outcast denizens of a small village with a man-made rabies epidemic. Another murderous housewife is the focus of 1994’s SerialMom, where Beverly Sutphin murders neighbors who don’t meet her high standards of behavior. As you might guess from those brief plot summaries, Waters is also fascinated by crime. The director used to attend courtroom trials for entertainment and has a large collection of newspaper clippings about serial killers. Criminals appear in almost all of his films. He has a particular fondness for juvenile delinquent characters, whether the aforementioned Dawn Davenport, Johnny Depp as Crybaby Walker inCrybaby, the Fishpaw siblings inPolyester, shoplifting sidekick Matt inPecker, orTracy Turnblad and her friends in Hairspray. Many of these characters are broad caricatures of the dangerous teenagers the media warns us about, but in Hairspray, Tracy Turnblad breaks the law and defies her parents for a good cause: to integrate The Corny Collins Show, a racially segregated TV dance show similar toAmerican Bandstand. She’s a juvenile delinquent with a political agenda. Waters basedThe Corny Collins ShowonThe Buddy Deane Show, which aired in Baltimore when he was a teenager. InHairspray, Tracy’s rebellion successfully integrates the show, but in real life The Buddy Deane Showwas canceled, possibly due to protests from both pro- and anti-integration activists. Perhaps because of its feel-good message, Hairsprayhas become the most popular of Waters’ films, spawning a Broadway musical and, in turn, a film version of the musical. The renegade filmmakers who kidnap actress Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) in 2000’s Cecil B. Demented are perhaps too old to be juvenile delinquents, but they’re still young enough to think they can destroy the Hollywood system. They’ve tattooed their arms with the names of their favorite directors, including Fassbinder, Otto Preminger, and Kenneth Anger. Waters’ deep love of cinema—from the exploitation films of Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis to the highbrow art films of Pasolini—is on display in many of his movies. Todd Tomorrow, the handsome hunk played by Tab Hunter in Hairspray, owns an artsy drive-in movie theater showing a Marguerite Duras triple bill. Movie posters, including one for Pasolini’s Teorema, decorate the home of the villainous Marbles inPink Flamingos. The title character in 1998’s Pecker ends the film resolving (or threatening?) to become a filmmaker himself, but most of Pecker is about how his amateur photography garners the attention of the New York art scene. Art and the art world are another of Waters’ obsessions. Artists of all kinds appear in his films: painters, singers, dancers, performance artists, musicians, even fiber artists like Lulu Fishpaw in Polyester, a delinquent teen who finds redemption through macramé. Waters has a rich knowledge of cinema history, but where does he fit into that history? B. Ruby Rich’s essay, “From Underground Movies to the New Queer Cinema,” positions him as an important bridge between America’s early underground gay filmmakers (like Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, and Andy Warhol) and the filmmakers of the 1990s who are considered part of the New Queer Cinema (a term Rich herself coined), such as Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye, and Gregg Araki. Waters has acknowledged the influence of George and Mike Kuchar, the twin Bronx filmmakers who made hundreds of often tawdry shorts starring their friends. In turn, Waters’ own influence can be seen in the work of the New Queer Cinema directors, whose films often focused on similar themes: crime, social outcasts, the American family, and troubled teenagers. After reading Rich’s essay, I thought of how Gregg Araki’s films, such as The Doom Generation(1995) or Nowhere (1997), with their garish costuming, deliberately stagey dialogue, and troubled young people, take aspects of Waters’ work and use them in a more æsthetic and erotic way. And, much like Waters, Todd Haynes made his own Douglas Sirk-inspired film, Far from Heaven(2002), while Haynes’ most recent film, May December (2023), is focused on a dysfunctional suburban family with a monstrous mother. Julianne Moore’s character in that film, a quietly psychotic cake-baking mom who’s married to the man she seduced when he was only thirteen, is clearly a cousin to the serial moms and abusive mothers Waters featured in so many of his classics. Like Waters, Haynes is a gay man using a camp sensibility to examine straight social norms. The New Queer Cinema directors didn’t shy away from portraying sex, and sex, particularly of the fetishistic variety, is also a subject Waters has returned to repeatedly. Waters has spoken often about his fascination with sexual fetishes, and fetishists of all kinds appear in his movies, including voyeurs, foot fetishists, adult babies, and leathermen. Multiple Maniacs features Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions, a carnival sideshow of sexual fetishists, including bicycle seat sniffers, puke eaters, and armpit lickers. These fetishes may not be your thing, but that’s okay. Sex scenes in John Waters’ movies are played either for laughs or for shock value, not for erotic impact. JOHN WATERS Pope of Trash Edited by Jenny He and Dara Jaffe DelMonico Books. 255 pages, $59.95 12 TheG&LR
HOW HAVE LGBT people been represented in Oscar-honored films to date, and might it have been otherwise? The first actor to win an Academy Award for playing a character who was indisputably gay was William Hurt, for the doomed (and morally inscrutable) Luis Molina in Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, in 1985. To be sure, there had been queer-coded characters in Best Picture-winning films before that—Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Cowboy spring to mind—but, with Hurt’s Spider Womanwin, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences betrayed a pattern of hostile prejudice toward LGBT people that would play itself out in the years to come. That LGBT people in film are disproportionately represented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. Active and passive homophobia in Hollywood was sweepingly chronicled by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet and by subsequent film historians. Here my focus—and grievance—is with Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT people perish or come to a bad end. Briefly stated, the past four decades form an era in which the major studios have finally acknowledged the existence of gay people even as they have persisted in punishing gay characters for daring to exist. SinceKiss of the Spider Woman, fourteen more Oscars have been bestowed for roles or films in which explicitly queer lead characters die by suicide (four), gunshot wounds (three), beatings (two), AIDS (two), poisoning (one), lethal injection (one), and gender-affirming surgery (one), making the Academy a wax museum of cinematic LGBT deaths. If we were to assume that ESSAY Queer Ghosts on Oscar Night ANDREWWHITE Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story. Oscar-winning films killed off cisgender and straight characters at a similar rate to queer ones, we would be sorely mistaken. Since the Spider Woman offered Molina her Kiss, 25 or more straight and cisgender characters have survived slavery, the Old West, World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, homelessness, and Hannibal Lector in Academy Awardwinning movies. Only thirteen straight characters have died in Oscar-winning roles or as leads in Best Picture winners since 1985—giving heterosexual and cisgender characters a three in four chance of survival and LGBT characters approximately the same odds of perishing before the credits roll. That’s entertainment, so they say. Oscar-surviving, cinematically out LGBT people of the last four decades have included Queen Anne of England, Don Shirley (in GreenBook), and Truman Capote, along with the gay youth Chiron inMoonlight (2016) and the bundle of stereotypes that Penelope Cruz portrayed in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona(2008)— and that’s about it. Adding insult to injury, the odds that a Best Actor playing a gay character will be straight and an Oscar winner playing a transgender character will be cis and opposite sex are 100 percent. Setting aside the then-closeted winners Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey, the number of out queer actors who have won a Best Actor since 1985 is zero. While straight actors who take queer roles may appear to obstruct the development of LGBT careers at cinema’s highest tiers, readers will rejoice to learn that ostensibly heterosexual actors Stanley Tucci—lauded for multiple gay roles—and Benedict Cumberbatch—Oscarnominated for two—seem to suffer no pangs of guilt for the gayface roles they accept. Tucci marshaled unnamed “gay men” who conveniently confirmed that he “did it the right way” when asked by the BBC how he responds to criticism for playing gay. Asked a parallel question by IndieWire about playing a gay role inPower of the Dog, Cumberbatch protested: “Is this a thing where our dance card has to be public? Do we have to explain all our private moments in our sexual history?” Well, no need to explain. Identity theft has been a grand tradition in Hollywood at least since the 1930s, when Warner Oland—born in Sweden—starred in sixteen films as the Asian detective Charlie Chan. How did we get here? Stonewall stormed the closet in 1969, the American Psychiatric Association pulled heterosexuality from its pedestal (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) in 1973, and—notwithstanding David Bowie’s best efforts to exploit bisexuality as edgy and iconoclastic—queerness became almost banal in early 1980s popular culture. Movies released during Reagan’s first term might cast us as murderers (1980’s CruisingandDressed to Kill), victims (1984’s Mike’s Murder), or both (1982’s Deathtrap). On the other hand, Victor/Victoria May–June 2024 13 William Hurt inKiss of the Spider Woman, 1985.
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