Out of The Celluloid Closet

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

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 Flatliners 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.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles