It’s actually a very good movie, and I must say when the lesbianism-and title-were restored for the 1961 movie (with Shirley MacLaine killing herself because of the lezzie talk), it was deeply disturbing.Ĭary Grant is songwriter Cole Porter and Alexis Smith is his wife Linda, but this being a 1940s Hollywood biopic, there’s no mention of Cole’s proclivity for boys. Joel McCrea, Miriam Hopkins, and Merle Oberon play the trio, with nasty student Bonita Granville wreaking havoc with her tawdry gossip.
In movieland, the character could be a neurotic, social climbing hooker, but not a dyke!īased on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children's Hour, centered on a child’s lie about a lesbian affair, the movie became a straight love triangle with no mention of same-sex happenings, thanks to the Production Code in effect at the time. So what?” Well, Hollywood wasn’t so blithe about the whole thing. In the book, she reveals that she once lived with a “dyke” and that everyone assumed that made Holly gay too. Also, the film decidedly steamrolled over Holly’s bisexuality while they were at it. It’s certainly far from the flat-out kissing-in-the-rain romance that ensues in the movie. In the book, the narrator seems a bit ambiguous as he becomes captivated by call girl Holly Golightly. The film adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella is enchanting, but it ain’t the book. It won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2001. But the Ron Howard-directed film stayed away from all that, because you can’t taint a mentally ill person with negatives, after all. Mathematician John Nash was reportedly bisexual, had dalliances with men in his early years, and was busted for indecent exposure in a rest room. But when stuff was restored for a director’s cut, it got a great response at Lincoln Center this year and a potential gay classic was born. And so, 45 minutes were replaced by 25 minutes of new scenes and voiceovers, and the tampered-with product failed to score with either critics or audiences. Putting them in a gay-tinged epic was supposedly out of the question, no matter how inaccurate any other version of that club would be. What’s more, Harvey Weinstein reportedly got nervous because Phillippe seemed on the verge of stardom and Meyers had just had a smash as Austin Powers. Supposedly, test audiences didn’t like the same sex kiss between Phillippe and a character played by Breckin Meyer. But the movie-which starred Ryan Phillippe as an upwardly mobile bartender-had been basically disemboweled and removed of its beating heart, so it was bound to fail. There were glimmers of fabulousness in Mark Christopher’s film about the ultimate ‘70s disco, Studio 54, especially in Mike Myers’ spot-on performance as feisty co-owner Steve Rubell. Here are some of the most glaring de-gayings in film history.
The result was a parade of sanitized, asexual films that sometimes failed with the public anyway because they lacked guts and integrity. So many times, movies have shied away from gay issues, usually because of a fear that such things would upset the masses and hurt the box office. This is turning out to be a smashing year for LGBT movies, which makes it a good time to sit back and reflect upon the periods when that wasn’t necessarily the case.