At The Movies: Surprise! I’m Gay!

Clue (1985)

Surprise gay reveal: State Department bureaucrat Mr. Green (Michael McKean)

What’s the story: During the 1950’s Red Scare, six strangers are summoned to a spooky house, where it is revealed that all of them are being blackmailed. While everyone’s guilty secrets are revealed — Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren) runs a brothel, Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan) accepts bribes on behalf of her politician husband — Mr. Green stands up and announces to the group that he is, in the parlance of the era, “a homosexual.” He adds that he feels no shame about this, but that he would lose his security clearance if the truth were revealed.

Michael McKean

Cat’s out of the bag: In a gimmick that stays true to the film’s board-game origins, Clue offers three endings and two possible resolutions for Mr. Green’s storyline. In two of them, he is innocent of any of the film’s multiple murders, but the other characters treat him like a hapless boob, smacking him around and subjecting him to condescending barbs. The other ending posits that Mr. Green is in fact a plant from the FBI, and after he turns his co-stars over to the authorities, Green ends the film by staring at the camera and declaring, “I’m going to go home and sleep with my wife.”

Bold or Blah?: He’s not handled any more cartoonishly than any of the film’s other two-dimensional characters, granted, but it’s a little grating that in the ending that features a heroic Mr. Green, the movie has to tell us that he’s really straight after all. (And this may be the rare movie in which not letting the gay character be a murderer feels discriminatory, but that’s a whole other discussion.)

How surprising?: Two Monkeys

The Children’s Hour (1961)

Surprise gay reveal: Schoolteacher Martha (Shirley MacLaine)

What’s the story: Martha and her dear friend Karen (Audrey Hepburn) have opened a successful girls’ school in New England, but their dreams come crashing down around them when an obnoxious little girl (Karen Balkin) spreads the lie that the two women are lesbians. Even though the child’s story isn’t true, it strikes a chord with Martha, who is indeed a lesbian and has harbored feelings for Karen for years without being able to identify or express them.

Audrey Hepburn, James Garner & Shirley Maclaine

Cat’s out of the bag: Once Martha confesses her true feelings to Karen, she does what most queer movie characters of the era did — she kills herself.

Bold or Blah?: Bold for the time, yet still overwrought and shame-filled. (Sometimes it just works out that way.) MacLaine gives a great interview in the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995) in which she admits, regarding the film’s discussion of lesbianism, “We didn’t do the picture right. We were in the mindset of not understanding what we were basically doing.”

How surprising?: 1.5 Monkeys