Home »

The bad old days of worse gay representation

In the warmup to the release of the high-profile gay-themed comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, folks are dipping into all sorts of film history pots. We ran a piece on other "social issue" comedies from days gone by, and now gay critic Dave White over at MSNBC has run a pretty entertaining piece on movies that were far worse than Chuck and Larry in terms of gay offense.

Luckily, most of these movies will likely be utterly unfamiliar, which means they only saw daylight for a moment before slinking back under their rocks and the damage they did was fairly minimal.

For example: 1971's Some of My Best Friends Are, which he describes as a more mean-spirited Boys in the Band (which, having just watched Band last week myself, is no small feat). Hopefully even those people who saw this movie upon release were so messed up at the time that it's nothing more than a faded fever-dream.

Likewise the Affleck/Lopez bomb Gigli, which was apparently about a man who turns a plucky lesbian straight. I say "apparently" because I have yet to meet a single person who has actually seen it, which begs the question: If a plucky lesbian falls for Ben Affleck in the forest but there's nobody there to see it, does it still qualify as a sad Chasing Amy knockoff?

White also includes the monumentally awful thriller Windows, in which Elizabeth Ashley terrorizes Talia Shire because she's got the hots for her. I just saw this one on bootleg a few months ago and it's easily the most offensive thing I've ever seen toward lesbians -- but again, fortunately it's so erased from the cultural record that there's absolutely no way to be exposed to its venom unless you're sick like me and you track it down with a pickaxe and night goggles.

Are there any films you think should be added to White's list in terms of wretched representations? He includes a lot of lady-oriented movies (and we leave that to our sisters at AfterEllen), but guy-flicks are most pertinent here.

(image at top is of John Phillip Law and Rod Steiger in The Sergeant)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

You are here

AE on Facebook



Active Forum Topics