The gay attacks on Pauline Kael

Kael took up the treatment of gay characters again in her review of "Victim," the 1961 thriller about the blackmail of homosexuals that Britain's anti-gay statutes then encouraged:

"A minor problem in trying to take 'Victim' seriously even as a thriller is that the suspense involves a series of 'revelations' that several of the highly-placed characters have been concealing their homosexuality; but actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway, that it's hard to be surprised at what we've always taken for granted -- in fact, in this suspense context of who is and who isn't, it's hard to believe in the actors who are supposed to be straight."

Is this bigotry? To me it shows enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes -- in a dark period when other reviewers (like Time's), as she jeered, "felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread." But her larger -- and more controversial -- criticism is that the film's rectitude tips over into piety:

"I'm beginning to long for one of those old-fashioned movie stereotypes -- the vicious, bitchy old queen who said mean, funny things. We may never again have those Franklin Pangborn roles, now that homosexuals are going to be treated seriously, with sympathy and respect, like Jews and Negroes."

Predictably, Kael's gay critics miss the irony (and the humor) in this passage and conclude that she's arguing against treating homosexuals "with sympathy and respect." But here, as that "seriously" signals, those terms are corroded. (Compare the pejorative spin she always gave virtuous.) "In 'Victim,'" she complained, "there is so much effort to make us feel sympathy toward the homosexuals that they are never even allowed to be gay." To Russo, "This was like saying that there was so much effort to make us feel sympathy for blacks in 'Nothing but a Man' or 'One Potato, Two Potato' that they were never allowed to tap dance or eat a slice of watermelon." Nonsense. It's Russo who, with the best intentions (and I use the word advisedly), is falsifying his experience. As Kael had argued back in "Movies, the Desperate Art," "The situation is not simple. Art derives from human experience, and the artist associates certain actions and motivations with certain cultural and vocational groups because that is how he has observed and experienced them ... It is the germ of observed truth that pressure groups fear, a germ which infects only the individual but which the group treats as epidemic."

She wasn't cavalier. "To allow the artist to treat his experience freely may be dangerous," she acknowledged. But to deny that freedom -- to demand "whitewashes, smiles and lies" -- is worse. And, if I can say so without being misinterpreted, there is considerable beauty in tap dancing. Twenty-four years after "Victim," Kael returned to her defense of the nelly queen in her review of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Hector Babenco's 1985 film version of the Manuel Puig novel about a window dresser and a revolutionary locked together in a Latin American prison cell. Babenco's adaptation struck her as timid -- it would have been better, she thought, "if the sexual relationship between the two men had been ongoing (as it is in the book), and not just the one-night affair of the movie" -- but her larger objection was to Babenco's treatment of the gay window dresser, Molina, who represented "the delirium of excess" to Puig and to her. "Babenco, in all his earnestness, is out to prove that silly old queens are useful, upstanding citizens, and he has steamrollered the romance and absurdity out of the material," she protested. "I don't believe that Puig saw any need for Molina to be redeemed."

And Kael was alert to real homophobia. A 1972 observation about blaxploitation films -- "These movies are often garishly anti-homosexual; homosexuality seems to stand for weakness and cowardice -- 'corruption'" -- still applies to the hip-hop scene. She denounced Ken Russell's gay-themed movies ("homo-erotic in style, and yet in dramatic content ... bizarrely anti-homosexual") as "flaming anti-faggotry." And she was sensitive to subtler kinds of homophobia, as in the 1977 ballet picture "The Turning Point":

"Would movie audiences care whether the male dancers were actually homosexual, as long as they moved with precision and refinement, and could soar when necessary? Maybe some still would; maybe there is a sound commercial instinct behind this picture's attempt to ingratiate itself by showing ballet as 'normal.' But ... it would be more honorable to take a chance on the audience."

Next Page: Of the dozens upon dozens of references to homosexuality in Kael's work, here's the one that really bothers me

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