Where the Boys Are

"By 1970," predicted a transvestite at the end of La Dolce Vita, "the entire world will be homosexual." Looking at some recent American films, the moviegoer might be inclined to believe that the prognosis is already coming true. Hollywood has suddenly discovered homosexuality, and the "third sex" is making a determined bid for first place at the box office.

Unashamedly queer characters are everywhere: in big films (Boom!), little films (P.J.), melodramas (The Fox) and comedies (The Producers). In a new documentary, The Queen,* they parade by the camera in a transvestite beauty . pageant. More of them are on the way to neighborhood screens. Staircase, a play about two aging male lovers has been bought by 20th Century-Fox; The Killing of Sister George, a tragicomedy concerning a tweedy lesbian and her baby-doll companion, is now being filmed by Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) in London. Oscar Winner Rod Steiger's next big film, The Sergeant, is about a homosexual G.I. who re-enlists to get closer to the boys. CBS Films this month announced that it has bought the rights to The Boys in the Band, an off-Broadway hit in which all the characters are homosexuals. In March, 20th Century-Fox snapped up the rights to Gore Vidal's torture and transvestite novel, Myra Breckinridge, for $500,000.

Fear of Censorship. Certain treatments of homosexuality, of course, are as old to movies as the custard pie. Effeminacy always brought out the vitriolic best in comedians, particularly in pre-code days. Both W. C. Fields and Chaplin made the dandified sissy a prime object of putdowns and pratfalls. But a serious, forthright approach to sexual inversion was slow to appear. When Hollywood first filmed Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour in 1929, fear of censorship forced Director William Wyler to substitute an innocent boy-meets-girl plot for the original lesbian relationship. When Billy Wilder made The Lost Weekend in 1945, he deleted all the book's references to the hero's homosexual self-doubts. The screen adaptation of Crossfire (1947) transformed the victim from a homosexual into a Jew.

The real changes began a decade ago with the gradual easing of industry censorship. Although the deviate references in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) were cooled down considerably for the screen, two years later his Suddenly Last Summer was filmed with explicit references to pederasty. In the early '60s, the central characters in both Advise and Consent and The Best Man had their political careers ruined by past homosexual experiences. But even last year, some American film makers were still shy about dealing with the subject too openly: Richard Brooks eliminated most of the overt homosexual overtones from the characters of Dick and Perry in In Cold Blood. Screen Writers Robert Benton and David Newman abandoned their original notion of Clyde Barrow's relationship with C. W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde.

New Scenes. Where has Hollywood's sudden vivid interest in homosexuality come from? "It comes from what's happening all around,'' suggests Director John Schlesinger, whose new film, Midnight Cowboys is about a male prostitute. "Everybody does more or less what he wants to these days, and no one says anything about it. Films are a reflection of that attitude, and homosexuality is just one part of the whole scene."

No one could be happier about that than the gay boys themselves. "I think it's wonderful," says Ed Trust, president of the Mattachine Society. "These movies will show people that we are, first of all, people; second, homosexuals." That, however, may be a bit premature. While Hollywood bravely hurls words like "fag" across the screen, most of the homosexuals shown so far are sadists, psychopaths or buffoons. If the actors are mincing more than the dialogue these days, that may only be because Hollywood has run out of conventional bad guys.

* Not to be confused with The Queens (TIME, Mar. 22), an uncompromisingly heterosexual Italian film.

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