The Gay & Lesbian review
march-april 2001
march-april 2001
Andrew Holleran
Queer as Folk in the history of a taboo
перепечатка в электронном издании
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Brief History of a Media Taboo.THE American version of Queer as Folk broadcast on Showtime--the same network that picked up Tales of the City when PBS declined to film more episodes--is just that: an American remake of a successful gay melodrama created for Britain's Channel 4 by gay TV writer Russell Davies. The cross-cultural fertilization sometimes shows. Though Queer as Folk is ostensibly set in Pittsburgh, it was filmed in Toronto, but doesn't seem to occur anywhere, really. Given the melange of the British, the American, and the generic, it comes out as--what?--vaguely Canadian.
Nothing else is vague, however. "The thing you need to know," Michael says in the show's opening line, "is that it's all about sex." Indeed it is. Homosex: a topic that has been emerging on film in this country in a slow, tortuous fashion--with many a long hiatus--since, you might say, The Boys in the Band in 1970. Of course, it's not that simple. John Huston's film of Carson McCullers's novel Reflections in a Golden Eye came out in 1967, and Larry Kramer's Women in Love in 1968. Still, the way some suppose gay writing began after Stonewall, the first explicitly gay movie in most people's minds is Mart Crowley's birthday party in The Boys in the Band. And yet--such is the long antediluvian night leading to Queer as Folk--consider: it was twelve long years before Hollywood announced another major gay film, Making Love, and that movie seemed to implode under the weight of what it was supposed to be: the first gay love story from Tinseltown. You'd never know it watching Queer as Folk, but for a long time this co untry was unnerved by the problem of making a film about homosexuality that both gays and straights could watch--not to mention the sheer uncertainty of just what America would allow when it came to depicting gay sex.
When Making Love came out in 1982, for instance, a friend who saw it in Pueblo, Colorado, says people threw things at the screen as the two men started to make out. Even gay moviegoers held their breath when Peter Finch kissed Murray Head in Sunday, Bloody Sunday--John Schlesinger's marvelous, taboo-smashing movie in 1971 that came, like Queer as Folk, from England. Even that, however, did not settle the questions that stymied American film-makers: Could gay men really kiss on screen? For how long? Would playing gay ruin an actor's career? Could a gay movie make money? And, finally, for the gay film-maker, how could one depict gay life as it really was without shaming gays before the gentiles?
It was only AIDS that allowed TV to make movies-of-the-week like An Early Frost in the 80's; and though an occasional documentary like The Word is Out appeared on PBS, gay films were for gay film festivals, John Waters was underground, and anything offered to a mainstream audience seemed to be tom by a schizophrenic desire on the part of movie-makers to: a) show the audience that gay people are different, and b) insist that they're just like everyone else--especially in matters of the heart (Making Love as an antidote to The Boys in the Band). Even people who succeeded once fell prey to these contradictions on their second try. The Boys in the Band's director, William Friedkin, had to deal with street demonstrations led by Vito Russo against his next gay movie, Cruising (1980); and John Schlesinger's recent film with Madonna and Rupert Everett about a gay man and his female best friend, The Next Best Thing, was apparently a flop, clumsily divided into a comedy and a darker drama.
On the other hand, basking in Showtime's new series one remembers the gay films that didn't care what "They" thought but instead took a hard, satiric look at gay life. To be sure, they were few and often European. Queer as Folk brings most to mind Taxi Zum Klo, which was greeted with rapture in 1981 for its biting portrait of a sex-crazed Berlin toilet queen and his stay-at-home lover. (But where-oh-where is Frank Ripploh today?) Lately, documentaries like Jay Corcoran's Life and Death on the A List have asked hard questions about gay life and its values. But mostly gay film-making seemed to make everyone simply nervous. American film was only allowed to show that gay people were just like everyone else in matters of the heart, so long as they were either terminally ill or a drag queen (Tom Hanks in Philadelphia; all those imitations of La Cage Aux Folles and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). And things were no better on television. Liberace, Paul Lynde, and Charles Nelson Reilly were allowed to camp it up outrageously for middle America, but when Sidney, a sitcom starring Tony Randall, set out to portray a real gay man in Manhattan, the show lost its nerve and folded right away. The task of showing gay life as it was without worrying about its enemies seemed to be one only Europeans could master. (The same year Hollywood gave us Making Love, Fassbinder filmed Querelle.)
To be sure, nothing in Queer as Folk, as frank and unexpurgated as it is, can surpass the haunting images in Reflections in a Golden Eye--of the naked man on horseback or Brando patting his hair as he waits for him to come upstairs; or the wrestling match before the fire in Women in Love; or the kiss in Sunday, Bloody Sunday; or, for that matter, Blanche Dubois and the paperboy in A Streetcar Named Desire. They may seem to have led nowhere, but in fact all these movies--and the interplay between Europe and America, Hollywood and gay film festivals, movies and TV--were moving us along, so that by the time a film like Paul Rudnick's In and Out proved a gay movie could make money (the Hollywood criterion), what seemed like an instant deluge of commercial gay movies (The Opposite of Sex, Boys Don't Cry, Gods and Monsters, The Broken Hearts Club) made it difficult for even gay fans to keep up. Now we have Will & Grace; and just as that TV series--which is completely schizophrenic: Will conforms, Jack screams--blew network television open, word reached us from Britain of Queer as Folk. It seems that taboos are like buildings that are razed professionally: once dynamited, they come down in a few seconds.
And yet, while Queer as Folk is clearly the culmination (for now) of this long and tedious history, it's still shocking. This series makes Will & Grace look like what it is--a sitcom (a sometimes repellent little sitcom). It's what one wanted Will & Grace to be--a real exploration of gay life, anal warts and all. Ads in gay magazines urge readers to order Showtime by calling 1-800-COMING OUT--but the show can also be seen by straights, as if that schism no longer matters. And it doesn't, in a way, because Queer as Folk is inconceivable on network TV or even in a multiplex; it's a result of the revolutionary splintering of the TV audience that cable has made possible. It's brutal, hard-nosed, and very sexual and doesn't seem to care, though worries that Queer as Folk is airing our dirty laundry are silly--it's also as moralistic as any novel by Jane Austen, placing so many obstacles between its characters and True Love that we're hooked on the suspense of waiting to see whether the proper couples get together, the way we are in Pride and Prejudice. Even if everything's up-to-date (drugs, disco, gym), the spine of the show is a moral controversy: as Ted puts it to Michael, if we can't sleep with our friends, but only with strangers, how are we ever going to have sex with anyone "who gives a shit about us"?
The British template--all of which was used up in the first few American episodes; the remaining twenty or so are all new--shows through in scenes where the class conflict (Michael's mother going to see Justin's for the first time) and Joe Orton-like farce (Ted waking up in the hospital to find Brian screwing the nurse) are somehow more British than American. Brian himself, in fact, is an 18th-century rake, a cad, a villain reminiscent of the narrator in The Swimming Pool Library: a cold, efficient sex shark. ("Brian," Michael tells the teenager Brian has just dumped, "doesn't do boyfriends.") But it's his iconoclasm that propels the show. Here's Brian on gay solidarity: "Just because I flick guys it doesn't mean I'm part of a community or have anything in common with anyone else who does." On the gay and lesbian center: "A safe haven for fags who can't get laid." On being told Ted and his new friend are getting to know each other before they have sex: "What are you--two lesbians?" On being asked to explain h is contempt for a friend who overdosed on a drug given him by a trick: "You only do drugs with your friends, 'cause they're the only ones who give a flick about you."
For all Brian's villainy, the pattern of Queer as Folk becomes clear--it's not just a Jane Austen novel, it's a buddy picture, based on that tenet of gay folk wisdom: your friends--the ones who'll be there after your trick leaves--are your family. The series tracks five men and two women at work and at play through the trials and tribulations of tricking, parenting, looking for a boyfriend, dealing with parents, homophobia, the closet, and competition on the dance floor. What's good about the series is that it's much more explicitly sexual in its depiction of this life than, say, PBS's version of Tales of the City, which, absent the randy cheerfulness of the text, ended up strangely downbeat. Brian, whose credo is, "If you don't do it right away, you don't do it at all," stretches credulity with a few of his sex-capades, but most of the sex is utterly convincing--including the bad sex. When the characters end up in bed in this show--naked, sweaty, scared, or predatory--the nakedness really is essential to the story, and, though no genitals are on view, we're a long way from the the wrestling match in Women in Love or the kiss in Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Which may be the real breakthrough of the show: that it integrates sex into the drama. It's so justified it makes you wonder, is mere porn now obsolete--not to mention much of gay fiction?
Print is probably still better at portraying the actual dull reality of life, its longueurs and nagging angst; but Queer as Folk makes the most of the advantages of film. There are scenes so true to life you'll gasp, so painful to watch that you may leave the room. There are others in which you can almost hear the actors running through their paces, the writers typing the dialogue. (The dilemma of Justin's mother learning her son is gay now seems deja vu, such is the evolution of gay subject matter in film, and the character who used to be the shocker in gay dramas--the campy queen--is here the one who seems most unreal.) This is a cliff-hanger--a TV melodrama--that goes in and out of verisimilitude, but it's always a scathing attack on problems rarely addressed in gay culture, and it's never sappy about them. When Ted, fresh from the hospital, walks past a gauntlet of beauties in the disco who all look away when he eyes them, and says, face shining, as he finally reaches his pal, "I've been rejected by everybody! It's good to be back!" he really means it. Which is why Queer as Folk is as fine as it--because it's complicated, unexpected, and realistic.
There will, of course, be gay viewers who find the series tedious (another disco drama) and others who find it too glitzy. A disclaimer at the end of each show says it's not meant to be representative of gay people, etc. (the schism endures). Christian radio stations are already attacking it; and with reason. Showtime is not a mass network compared to, say, NBC; the very thing that makes Queer as Folk possible, cable, is what makes it expensive, and even if you do have Showtime already, the show is on Sunday night at ten. In other words, it's hard to see. At the same time, the press release promises Showtime-supplied party kits for college campuses that include "fans, postcards, posters, coasters, party tips and premium giveaways such as muscle T-shirts and boxer shorts so that the student groups can create their own viewing party ... every Sunday night." One has to wonder, whether or not one is a Christian radio station, what will young people think of being gay after seeing this? After all, it is a sevente en-year-old's initiation into gay life that's at the heart of this story.
For people who came out into gay life before the 70's, there was little in the arts that allowed a gay beginner to live that life vicariously first. Now there are tons of sources. The media, ever needful of raw material, have not been slow to exploit gay subject matter. One can imagine a young gay person watching this series and thinking: If that's what awaits me, I'll pass. But no doubt he or she won't, or can't. Young people still want to smoke cigarettes and get laid--the way Justin (the seventeenyear-old) does. The really good thing about Queer as Folk is not that it dramatizes with wit a lot of painful issues we've not seen portrayed so acidly before (the sexual hierarchy, self-loathing, loneliness) but that it's so full of life. It makes you want to jump back in, if you're older, despite all you know. It reminds you of what it was like going home with someone for the first time. It makes gay life almost interesting again, for the same reason Henry James said "art makes interest, makes life."
Ours is an over-entertained, recombinant culture, and though Queer as Folk may look at first simply like a cross between The Boys in the Band and Tales of the City--or Meirose Place or Dawson's Creek-it's more original than that. It creates its own absorbing world-neither Hollywood nor Canada-with very good writing and superb acting. You'll ask yourself after watching: which one would I sleep with first? Who would be the best lover? And will Brian and Michael, or Michael and Ted, ever get together? And finally, will Queer as Folk improve the behavior of gay people toward each other? (Can anything improve it? Books admonishing us about circuit culture don't seem to have made a dent.) It's impossible to say where Queer as Folk is going, how deep it will be after 22 episodes, or how slick (it has strains of both), but on the basis of the first six installments, this kind of show is deeply welcome--the one gay people deserve, the one some of us have been waiting for--a long, long time.
Andrew Holleran's most recent work of fiction is a book of short stories titled In September, the Light Changes.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc.