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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 123 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 65

Out of the Celluloid Closet


Gay activists are on a rampage against negative stereotyping and
other acts of homophobia in Hollywood

By JANICE C. SIMPSON -- Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles


    The villainous stereotype may be an endangered species in
Hollywood. African Americans have already made it quite clear
that they are fed up with appearing in movies as muggers, pimps
and other disreputable characters. Arab Americans say they are
sick of being typecast as terrorists. And Native Americans have
had it with being portrayed as brutish scalp-craving savages.
Now gay activists are taking to the streets to decry the
growing number of movies that, they say, are stereotyping them
as psychopathic killers.

    Protests have been aimed specifically at some of
Hollywood's biggest and most prestigious films, including The
Silence of the Lambs, which features a crazed transvestite who
kills and flays women, and JFK, which has a scene in which gays
alleged to be conspirators in the Kennedy assassination cavort
in sadomasochistic fun and games. No movie, however, has
provoked more outrage in the gay community than Basic Instinct,
the box-office hit in which Michael Douglas plays a troubled
detective who falls in love with a mystery writer (Sharon Stone)
who is one of three bisexual or lesbian women suspected of
stabbing a man to death with an ice pick.

    Demonstrations protesting the portrayal of homosexual
women as man-hating murderers started when Basic Instinct began
filming in San Francisco last year and resumed when the film
opened. "Every lesbian and bisexual character in these films is
accused of being a psychotic killer," says Kate Sorensen, a
member of Queer Nation, which helped organize the protests. "And
the girl never gets the girl. I'm tired of that." Gay activists
across the country tried to dissuade moviegoers from seeing it
by telling them who the killer is as they lined up for tickets.

    The tactic did not work well: the killer's identity is not
clear, and the movie easily led the box-office sweepstakes in
its first weekend with a $15 million take. But more protests
were planned for the Oscar ceremony. Activists have successfully
forced their concerns about gay images in the movies out into
the open. They argue that all the onscreen mayhem is inciting
real-life violence against members of their community. A
five-city survey conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force Policy Institute reports a 31% increase in gay-bashing
incidents last year, including a jump in the number of anti-gay
murders to eight, from three in 1990.

    No doubt some of these attacks reflect a perverse fear of
AIDS or the rising intolerance that has caused an increase in
hate crimes of all kinds. Still, Hollywood's treatment of gays
hasn't helped. With few exceptions, the homosexual characters
in movies are creepy misfits or campy caricatures like the
ultra-fey wedding consultant played by Martin Short in Father
of the Bride. Their antics perpetuate the perception that gays
are marginal, dubious people.

    Movies that deal with homosexuality in a more honest
fashion are still largely taboo. Many moviegoers may have
assumed that the young women in the surprise hit Fried Green
Tomatoes were lovers (as is more clear in Fannie Flagg's novel),
but their relationship was muted in the film. Despite the
inherent drama in the AIDS crisis, only one U.S. feature film
about the disease, the independently produced Longtime
Companion, has been released. Gay activists say all this reserve
reflects a strong undercurrent of homophobia in the movie
community that has also caused many homosexual executives to
remain in the closet and actors of both sexual orientations to
shun overtly gay roles for fear of hurting their careers.

    Some small films are being made and released
independently. Among them is My Own Private Idaho, a story about
young male hustlers by Gus Van Sant, the director of Drugstore
Cowboy. But industry insiders attribute the dearth of mainstream
gay films to the fact that movies with gay themes don't do well
commercially. "If Longtime Companion had made as much money as
Home Alone, the studios would have 10 times the projects with
gay characters or stories in development," says Joel
Schumacher, director of Flat liners and Dying Young. "The
business doesn't care what you do in bed, but it does care what
you do at the box office."

    Awareness of the need for a different kind of sensitivity
is growing, however. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation has conducted seminars for staff members at Columbia
Pictures and Carolco. Meanwhile, departing Fox chief Barry
Diller and MCA president Sidney Sheinberg recently founded
Hollywood Supports, a service organization whose mission is to
combat "AIDS phobia and homophobia" in the entire entertainment
industry.

    But the activists have begun to alienate other studios and
powerful filmmakers who could help their cause but are turned
off by threats to "out" actors who refuse to cooperate with the
activists and by demands to vet scripts that deal with gay
subject matter. Oliver Stone was slated to produce and direct
The Mayor of Castro Street, a potential breakthrough film about
the life of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay
activist who was assassinated by a former city supervisor. But
Stone decided not to direct after Queer Nation members
threatened to disrupt his set because they objected to the way
he handled gays in some of his past films. "I'm tired of having
my neck in the guillotine," Stone told the Advocate, a national
gay publication. "The gay community is extremely outspoken, and
everyone in it is a movie critic. I don't need that." What is
needed is an open attitude and more good movies about gays.