Ask the Flying Monkey: Can a Movie Made by a Gay Artist be Homophobic?

This week: Does it matter if negative portrayals of gay people are created by gay people themselves? Plus, is Bugs Bunny bisexual?

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Q: What do you think is the worst portrayal of gay folks by a gay artist? – Milo, Indianapolis, Indiana

A: Oh, man, that is one serious can-o-worms! But I also think it’s an absolutely fascinating question, because of how the idea of social or “gay” responsibility clashes with the notion that artists have a personal responsibility to tell the truth as they see it. After all, it’s not the job of any artist to create propaganda or “sanitize” the truth.

But what if I think a project by a gay or bisexual artist portrays gay people in an inaccurate, stereotypical, or offensive way? If we’re both gay, who am I to say I’m right and he’s wrong?

On the other hand, if I can’t criticize or critique a gay artist’s work as untruthful or even “offensive,” why can I do that to a straight artist? Doesn’t the straight artist also have a right to his or her version of the truth – especially if other GLBT people are on record as agreeing with him or her? (And trust me, there’s always someone somewhere who does. Call this the Clarence Thomas factor.)

The fact is, I usually do give gay and bisexual artists the “benefit of the doubt” when it comes to criticizing gay projects, but for the life of me, I can’t intellectually explain why that’s fair.

All that said, there are a couple of gay-created projects that have given me pause over the years.

Take Tennessee Williams. I’m a huge, huge fan, and his plays are literally the reason I decided to become a writer of fiction myself. I think when he’s good, there has never been anyone better. But when he’s bad, as he was for most of the second half of his life, he could be pretty awful.

Tennessee Williams

One of my least favorite plays of his is actually from the middle of his career: 1958’s Suddenly Last Summer, a one-act play that became a 1959 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Katherine Hepburn (and adapted for the screen by another gay man, Gore Vidal).

The story? A brutal, self-centered gay man named Sebastian (cheekily named by Williams after Saint Sebastian, considered by some to be the very first gay icon) uses first his mother’s fading beauty, then Elizabeth Taylor in a see-through swim suit, to lure the young men and boys in a poor Spanish town to him so he can proposition them for sex.

After he’s screwed his way through the whole town [spoiler alert!], the boys are so upset that they turn on him, chasing him up a mountain and then … well, killing him and eating his body.

First, the thing makes almost no sense. Is Elizabeth Taylor in a see-through swimming suit in the bright daylight really the best way to solicit young boys for prostitution? And I mean, they end up eating him? I know this is an homage to the Euripides play The Bacchae, but in what universe would this really happen?

Elizabeth Taylor filming the iconic beach scene in Suddenly Last Summer.

Of course, it all plays as camp now, but this screams to me of Williams at his over-the-top, melodramatic worst – and also a chance for “literary” audiences in 1958 to take a shocking walk on the wild side, getting a voyeuristic thrill from peering into Williams’ seamiest sexual fantasies.

But mostly I’m curious why the most famous and influential out gay man at the time choose to put this out there. What essential “truth” was he compelled to express? Literally one of the very first openly gay characters in film … and he’s a psychotic who viciously hates women, hires young poor boys for abusive sex, and ends up getting eaten because they hate him so much? This movie says heterosexuals are right to hate and fear us, and if a straight mind had conceived this, I think I’d be livid.

(To be fair, almost all of Williams’ portrayals of gay men are pretty uniformly negative – probably a reflection of the homophobia of the time. And his non-gay characters aren’t exactly bastions of sanity either!)

Next page! Mart Crowley and Gus Van Sant do their worst.