According to Jeremy it’s Gay History Month which I inadvertently celebrated last week with a binge of gay history related media consumption. First up was another re-reading of Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, his coming-out story set in the deep south at the height of the civil rights movement and one of the best graphic novels ever produced ever. The introduction is by Tony Kushner, writer of the play Angels in America which was adapted, by Kushner, into a 6 hour HBO TV movie a couple of years back with an all star cast and quality director. I spotted the DVD on Sam’s shelf and, having a long night ahead of me, decided to check it out. It’s also very good, set in the mid eighties with Reagan at his apex and AIDS ravaging the gay community. For a very very long film about death, angst, lies, betrayal, regret and more death it’s a quite funny movie with wonderfully surreal moments. I highly recommend it.
While perusing the DVD box, however, something struck me. There is no mention whatsoever of the content of the film. If you picked this up in ignorance you would not know it’s a gay film by an acclaimed gay writer about AIDS. That’s a bit odd, I thought. Then inside the box is one of those leaflets advertising various HBO DVDs. Angels in America is described as exploring “the politics, morality and search for hope in the story of six interconnected characters and an Angel in the complex and turbulent world of New York in the late 1980′s. Spanning the extremes of tragedy, love and betrayal, and life and death, Angels in America in a journey through the landscape of despair and hope that defines America at the end of the 20th Century.” Can you say “don’t mention the gayness”? In the same leaflet the Tony Soprano is identified as a mob boss with a mid-life crisis, the Six Feet Under folk are undertakers and Band Of Brothers is is clearly about soldiers in World War Two. Yet Angels in America doesn’t seem to have anything to do with homosexuals. The web site is the same.
From a media ownership point of view, HBO is part of Ted Turner’s media group which was bought by Time Warner. Maybe there’s some right-wing political stuff going on. Except Time Warner also publish Stuck Rubber Baby. And HBO, while popular and successful, is not mainstream. It’s audience is every so slightly more high-brow than standard US TV and quite used to controversial themes. In other words, they can deal with the gayness and probably expect it.
Maybe it’s a trick on the part of the producers to get what they consider an important work into the hands of people who might, consciously or not, reject a movie about fags. But, according to Wikipedia, this was the most watched made-for-cable movie of its year, won a Golden Globe and an Emmy and was internationally acclaimed. Anyone who hears about Angels in American from a source other than HBO will know what it’s about. So why are HBO so reticent to go with the gayness? Is homophobia and the ghettoisation of queer culture really still so rife in our modern, enlightened age?
Of course it bloody is.
My experience with “gayness” in Houston over a twenty year period has been most revealing. It may seem strange to many that this midwestern city has America’s fourth largest gay community, largely concentrated in the Montrose area, immediately west of Downtown. Montrose is also the artistic center of the city (no surprise there) and in many ways typifies “gayness”. Out in the ‘burbs Montrose is seen as a wild place – “the place where they celebrate gay pride week and all that”. I have to admit that Gay Pride used to be an “in your face” kind of celebration that could be hard to understand in a community where red necks traditionally went “gay bashing” with baseball bats.
Back in the Reagan era Montrose suffered along with the rest of the gay community and the survival rate was incredibly low. Not that the rest of the city cared that much at the time. If anything this was the time when gay bashing was at its worst for “you can hit ‘em easier when they’re down”.
The survivors seem to have modified their relationships to the rest of society for today there is much more integration and “live and let live” is more the order of the day. Hopefully the straights have also come a long way toward understanding homosexuality and prime time TV has played a role though not always with success.
Signs of a change for the better include the fact that the elected City Controller (Houston’s Gordon Brown in English vernacular) is gay. She stood as City Councillor as a gay and was elected in a run off where her supporters really came out of the closet. I know her well as I worked with her at an oil company ten years ago and she has slowly won the respect of the community at large for being a model citizen who isn’t just interested in single issue politics.
So just why does HBO feel it necessary to put gayness back in the closet? Is it purely in the economics? Or is it that movie distributors are out of touch? My guess is that the latter has always been true – look at how many sleepers there are that don’t get distributed until after the Oscars! The good news is that the public do in fact latch on to what is worth watching, possibly by word of mouth, or in this case, the advice of gays who work in video stores!