The gay attacks on Pauline Kael

How did America's leading film critic, who was fearlessly opposed to cant and dogma of all stripes, come to be seen as a homophobe?

Jun 25, 2004 | The campaign to tar Pauline Kael as a homophobe began over her review of "Rich and Famous," a 1981 drama with a footnote value as the last film by George Cukor; the plot involves the 20-year friendship of a giddy popular novelist (Candice Bergen) and an occasionally promiscuous highbrow novelist (Jacqueline Bisset). Cukor was famously, but not publicly, gay, a circumstance that Kael, who found the movie idiotic, tried to address without forcing him out of the closet when she wrote, "'Rich and Famous' isn't camp, exactly; it's more like a homosexual fantasy. Bisset's affairs, with their masochistic overtones, are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into." When Stuart Byron, of the Village Voice, read those sentences, he hit the ceiling:

"I have news for Pauline. However much male gay life has followed promiscuous patterns not available to straights until the advent of the postpill paradise, the gay fantasy has always been exactly the same as the straight fantasy: love and happiness with one person forever ... As for Bisset, it is apparent that Kael, like the straight men who seem to have shaped her romantic consciousness, won't accept that Bisset has one-night stands and sometimes enjoys them -- and yet is not viewed as a sick nymphomaniac."

Vito Russo, the author of the pioneering 1981 study "The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies," echoed Byron's contention in an interview the following year:

"'Rich and Famous' had a promiscuous heroine and got attacked for it, notably by Pauline Kael, who attributed the promiscuity of a heterosexual character, a woman, to a homosexual sensibility, as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous. So when George Cukor created one for the first time, Kael said they shouldn't be like that; it's homosexual; they're the ones who are promiscuous."

No one familiar with Kael's writing on women and sex could take these words seriously. The most obvious rebuttal is her review of the 1977 "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," in which Diane Keaton played a woman who, as Kael put it, "cruises singles bars the way male homosexuals cruise gay bars and s-m hangouts." Kael disliked the movie -- not because it was debauched but because it wasn't sensual enough ("The teasing near-subliminal bedroom flashes are 'artistic,' not sensual") and because, like the novel it was drawn from, it moralized and psychologized ("as if a woman wouldn't want sex unsanctified by tenderness unless she was crippled, psychologically flawed, self-hating") for an audience that, in fact, already accepted the anonymous sex. It was "something that most women have done at some time -- or, at least, have wanted to do," she commented. "It's what nice people do when they're not feeling so nice."

In his revised (1987) version of "The Celluloid Closet," Russo wrote, "Pauline Kael attacked George Cukor's 'Rich and Famous' (1981) for having a covert gay sensibility." No: she noted the film had a covert gay sensibility. She attacked it for being, as she wrote, "hopelessly demented ... It's full of scenes that don't play, and often you can't even tell what was hoped for." But she did find the gay undercurrent problematic. "I see it as a picture with what is now called a closeted sensibility," she later elaborated. "The erotic passages simply didn't feel convincing to me as heterosexual, but surely it's not anti-gay to point out that the nuances of male-male and male-female pickups and seductions are somewhat different?" Apparently Russo thought it was, and though the film's pickup scene, with its heavy silences and tight smiles, reads to me as inescapably gay, there's probably no way to prove it. Russo didn't read it that way. No matter how he read it, though, it was contradictory for him to write that Cukor's homosexuality was something Kael "couldn't overtly discuss while the director was still alive because it's such a disgusting thing to say about someone in print that you can be sued for it" -- which misrepresents her reluctance to out him -- and then claim, on the same page, "Pauline Kael simply calls George Cukor a faggot."

Next Page: "English actors look so queer ... that it's hard to believe in the actors who are supposed to be straight"

• View blog reactions